Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/31
2016
491
Band 49 2016 Heft 1 Harald Höbus ch, Linda K . Worle y (Hr sg.) C O L L O Q U I A G E R M A N I C A I n t e r n a ti o n a l e Z e it s c h r ift f ü r G e r m a n i s ti k Die Zeitschrift erscheint jährlich in 4 Heften von je etwa 96 Seiten Abonnementpreis pro Jahrgang: € 132,00 (print)/ € 168,00 (print & online), Vorzugspreis für private Leser € 101,00; Einzelheft € 45,00 (jeweils zuzüglich Versandkosten). Bestellungen nimmt Ihre Buchhandlung oder der Verlag entgegen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH + Co. KG, Postfach 25 60, D-72015 Tübingen, Fax (0 70 71) 97 97 11 · E-Mail: info@francke.de Aufsätze - in deutscher oder englischer Sprache - bitte einsenden als Anlage zu einer Mail an hhoebu@uky.edu oder lworley@uky.edu (Prof. Harald Höbusch oder Prof. Linda K. Worley, Division of German Studies, 1055 Patterson Office Tower, University of Kentucky, Lexington, KY 40506-0027, USA). Typoskripte sollten nach den Vorschriften des MLA Style Manual (2008) eingerichtet sein. Sonstige Mitteilungen bitte an hhoebu@uky.edu © 2018 · Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH & Co. KG Alle Rechte vorbehalten/ All Rights Strictly Reserved Satz: Pagina GmbH, Tübingen Druck und Bindung: CPI buchbücher, Birkach ISSN 0010-1338 BAND 49 • Heft 1 Themenheft: Alle Menschen werden Schwestern: Sisters and Sorority in the German Cultural Tradition Gastherausgeber: Gail Hart Inhalt Introduction: Alle Menschen werden Schwestern: Sisters and Sorority in the German Cultural Tradition Gail Hart � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 3 Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister Barbara Becker-Cantarino � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 9 “Liebe, böse, Line! ”: Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion in the Letters of Karoline von Günderrode and her Sisters Jordan Lavers � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 27 Obscure Conceptions: The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… Eleanor ter Horst � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 43 The Ballad and its Families - Christina Rossetti, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Friedrich Hebbel and the Anti-Balladry of Sisterhood Adrian Daub � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 69 “Märchen mal anders”: Blood and Family in Fan Fiction Versions of Classic Folktales Jaime W. Roots � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 87 Autorenverzeichnis � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � 101 Introduction: Alle Menschen werden Schwestern 3 Introduction: Alle Menschen werden Schwestern: Sisters and Sorority in the German Cultural Tradition Gail Hart University of California, Irvine Schiller’s declaration of humanity’s universal brotherhood has been challenged and nuanced repeatedly in numerous fora, 1 and the organizers of the German Studies Association’s Family and Kinship panels chose to use the altered version as a heading for their 2015 program� The GSA ’s Family and Kinship Network promotes scholarly work on modes of kinship, both figurative and literal. As an interdisciplinary group, we follow the evolution of families 2 and the re-evaluation of family matters in literary and historical, legal and religious contexts, as well as the rhetorical adaptation of kinship metaphors and tropes to extra-familial situations. The essays presented here represent the Network’s 2015 focus on lateral relations within the family, namely sibling interactions with an emphasis on sisters and the varieties of sisterhood and sister relations� These include natural / biological, spiritual, and legal sisterhood, in addition to sisters by choice and sisters by fate� Incest and religious sisterhood were also topics of interest� Overall, the contributions to the panels responded in multiple ways to the call, addressing the literary status of sisters / siblings and stepsisters, the veiling of sisters in the convent, the borrowed and gendered notoriety of historical sisters of famous men, as well as specific and general sister-brother and sister-sister relationships� Sisters are historically very different from brothers within and outside the family and these differences are codified in Germanic law and literature. 3 Childbearing, property relations, succession, education, and primacy or precedence within the group are all factors in the existence and perception of sisters and their interactions with brothers, parents, in-laws, and offspring. In this issue, we have collected five articles that take these considerations in various directions, from documents of family history to a literary competition to the function of a popular genre and the contemporary modifications of traditional tales. Writing in a recent issue of the fashion magazine Vanity Fair , which also took up the theme of sisters and sisterhood, Graydon Carter remarks that sisters are “occasionally adversarial, completely different, and yet utterly familiar” (May 4 Gail Hart 2016, 50)� Though our program diverged considerably from that of the magazine with its photographs of rich and glamorous sisters in beautiful clothes, Carter’s emphasis on familiarity and difference is a useful epigraph for this grouping of scholarly essays� All the sisters and siblings addressed in these pages are quite - if not utterly - familiar to scholars of German Studies, but our contributors have provided new and different readings of these familiar family relations and, in many cases, staked out uncharted territory in the cultural assessment of sisterhood� The first two essays are rooted in the late eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries and based on intra-familial letters and the characterizations of sisters that emerge from these documents� Both look at family dynamics and the tensions and differences between and among sisters and siblings and both bring hitherto unpublished letters to light� Barbara Becker-Cantarino writes of Bettine Brentano-von Arnim (1785-1859) as a literary correspondent or Briefdichterin and as a practical correspondent who chronicled the events and emotions of a large and prosperous bourgeois family in Frankfurt. Bettine’s letters, especially the unpublished ones that up to now have held no obvious historical or literary historical value for editors, flesh out the everyday life, the Alltag , of the family group. Peter Anton Brentano or Pietro Antonio Brentano (1736-1797) had twenty children with three wives, thirteen of whom reached adulthood� Some were boys and some were girls and Becker-Cantarino shows the complex daily negotiations among the siblings as each assumed “ihre jeweilige Stellung im Familienverband je nach Alter und Geschlecht�” Further complicating the age and gender variables within the family was the matter of education� Boys received professional training and higher education, while the girls had private lessons designed to make them good wives for educated and prosperous husbands� Bettine resisted this program, exceeding family prescriptions for gendered intellectual life and her missives document the tensions that proceeded from her search for independence and empathy. Her affinities with her brother, noted author Clemens Brentano, are a point of interest and Becker-Cantarino assesses their “erotisch komplizierte Beziehung�” A literary older brother with all the advantages of seniority and male precedence may have had little trouble dominating - or at least fascinating - his literary-leaning younger sister� Yet Bettine matured and transcended Clemens’s influence and became an accomplished literary personality whose personal letters give us a privileged perspective on the growth and development of a large, and for the most part, loving family� Jordan Lavers’s contribution, “Liebe, böse, Line! ” examines the role of epistolary practices, literal and material, in the maintenance of sorority among the five Günderrode sisters. Karoline, Louise, Charlotte, Wilhelmine, and Amalie von Günderrode were, with the exception of Wilhelmine, single women who wrote Introduction: Alle Menschen werden Schwestern 5 individual and communal letters to their sisters during times of separation� Karoline, the “Line” of Lavers’s title, was, of course, also one of Bettine’s correspondents and the subject of her fictionalized Die Günderrode (1840). Based on extensive archival research and unpublished letters, Lavers’s work focuses on the material circumstances of letter writing, from the paper itself to the various collaborations and combinations of writers and those taking dictation, of those adding a postscript to another’s letter and those speaking for the whole group - usually Karoline� The relative ranking of sisters within the group, culturally based on age precedence and marital status, is also a factor in the epistolary practices of sorority� The material analysis and its application to the complex sister relationships constitute an unusual topic and little work has been published thus far using these analytical tools� Single women of the eighteenth century, who stayed at home, visited relatives, or entered convent-like arrangements and the letters they wrote to one another regarding mundane and familial issues have simply not stimulated widespread scholarly interest; it is to Lavers’s credit that he demonstrates the value of these documents as artifacts of kinship� Eleanor ter Horst’s essay on E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde brings in the dimension of religious sisterhood, as well as a startling reflection on a pair of “sister” texts of the early nineteenth century that have been separated by critical reception, namely Kleist’s Die Marquise von O and Hoffmann’s similarly themed novella. Whereas Kleist’s tale, first published in 1808, preceded Hoffmann’s (1817) by nine years and critics have openly preferred the former - ter Horst cites Hartmut Steinecke who pronounced the latter “eine schlechte Weiterführung des Kleistschen Motivs” her essay argues that it was Hoffmann’s project to displace the originary text and establish the primacy of his own� Though this maneuver recalls Harold Bloom’s oedipal patterns of authorship, ter Horst maintains that it is not a matter of overcoming the father but rather a struggle of siblings as Hoffmann “challenges the notion of temporal succession, of the distinction between original and copy.” She identifies all manner of kinship tensions between the two tales, each of which involves a woman who experiences an unexplained pregnancy and seeks seclusion, resisting marriage vows and, in the case of Hoffmann’s heroine, taking religious vows. Hermengilda, the daughter of Polish nobility, seeks to conceal her pregnancy and her visage in the home of a German Bürgermeister , where she wears both a mask and a veil� The riddle of paternity is never definitively solved in either tale, even as appearances suggest otherwise� Ter Horst elucidates a series of parallels between the novellas along with their acknowledged affinities and contributes significantly to our understanding of the much-commented-upon Marquise as well as bringing an original and invigorating reading of Das Gelübde. 6 Gail Hart In “The Ballad and its Families,” Adrian Daub focuses on the ballad genre and the ways in which it explores and perpetuates “the mysteries of sisterhood�” The mission of the ballad is transmission and sisterhood is a mode of knowledge that may or may not be successfully passed on from one poetic generation to the next or from writer to reader� Daub interrogates the form in some of its nineteenth-century representations, beginning with an intricate reading of Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” (1862). Rossetti’s sister figures, Laura and Lizzie, live alone and agitate in the absence of a mother as an “originary pair, but the balladic itinerary moves them toward a lesson in motherhood, in how to be a mother. Here, sisterhood becomes “a story to be told to one’s children,” an element of another, different, reproductive identity. Where “Goblin Market” yields tamely to didactic transmission, the ballads of Friedrich Hebbel and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff appear to be critical of balladic genealogy, problematizing “the narrative, the melodramatic, the dynastic dimensions of family�” Daub concentrates on Droste’s “Die Schwestern” (1844) that, like “Goblin Market,” conveys the story of two sisters in the absence of parents and children� Yet here, Daub finds significant differences in the piece’s perspectivism and its questioning of sisterhood or the male gaze’s potential construction of sisterhood. If sisterhood does indeed resist balladic transmission, the poem nonetheless raises very important questions about what sisterhood is, how and by whom it is perceived� Once again, sisters and sisterhood are, to echo Carter, utterly familiar but radically different. The final article in this issue brings us into the twenty-first century with an analysis of a practice that began long ago but has now blossomed on the internet, namely fan fiction or the revision and rewriting of familiar texts and tales to reflect the new author-usurper’s social circumstances or world view. Jaime Roots’s “Märchen mal anders” follows familiarity and difference in the genre of the fairy tale as it has evolved in online German fan fiction. Roots focuses on “Questions of foreignness and belonging” and the ways in which the Grimm Brothers’ Kinder und Hausmärchen (1812-57) dealt with them as opposed to current internet adaptations. She is specifically interested in questions of who belongs in the family or, even more specifically, the position of “step” relatives. Becker-Cantarino notes that Bettine Brentano-von Arnim, despite her ruminations on the bond between full-blood siblings, did not make the referential distinction in her letters between step-siblings and those who were her mother’s children and Becker-Cantarino sees this as a matter of inclusiveness in the Brentano family, a refusal to distinguish “full” from “partial” relatives� In a similar vein, Gustafson bases her Goethe’s Families of the Heart on the thesis that Goethe envisioned love and not blood as the foundation of the family in his novels and plays that bring together many loving groups of unrelated in- Introduction: Alle Menschen werden Schwestern 7 dividuals� Roots opposes the traditional status of blood vs� step-siblings in folk tales to more recent tellings of these tales and identifies a trend toward broader inclusiveness. She begins her investigations of familiarity and difference with several of the Grimm tales that illustrate the relatively lofty assessment of blood sibling relations and the degraded status of step-siblings� Of course the most famous of these is “Aschenputtel”, the Cinderella story of a father’s true daughter left in the care of a stepmother and stepsisters who mistreat and isolate her as an element alien to the family - though they themselves become abjected and foreign to Aschenputtl’s new family after her marriage to the prince. Roots finds an adherence to German particularity and nascent nationalism in the crucial distinction between the foreign and the familiar in Aschenputtel’s family. This she attributes to the Zeitgeist of a time when the Napoleonic wars had just concluded and German identity was being formed or reclaimed� Roughly two centuries later, with the nation well-established, the vigilance about German-ness has diminished and both the state and the family have expanded to acknowledge inclusionary factors other than blood. In the overwhelmingly female (sisterly? ) community of online fan fiction writers, Roots identifies a tendency to reassess not only Cinderella but the importance of blood relations in general in a world where the definition of family, of who belongs and who is excluded, has changed considerably. Her investigation of fan fiction leads to important conclusions about family members, brothers, stepsisters, and sisters in the current age and also a lesson in the effects of internet technology on literature. It furthermore suggests that both Goethe and Bettine, once each other’s correspondents, were on to something. Now, as Germany’s openness to outsiders is being tested as never before, it is to be hoped that the values evident in Roots’s examples of fan fiction will prevail. Our five contributors have advanced our thinking about sisterhood, its contexts, and its meanings; however, this remains a topic that merits and requires further attention and further development. We hope that the following essays will inspire and enable future work on the bonds of sisterhood� 4 Notes 1 See especially, Luise Pusch, Alle Menschen werden Schwestern: Feministische Sprachkritik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990); Claudia Robot’s rock anthem of the same title; and Irene Fleiss’s accounts of the matriarchy, Als alle Menschen Schwestern waren (Perfect Paperback, 2006). 2 Susan Gustafson’s recent Goethe’s Families of the Heart is a good example. Gustafson examines the non-blood relations in Goethe’s work that are equivalent to kinship, including those in Wilhelm Meister and Wahlver- 8 Gail Hart wandtschaften � Though “fractured families” have long been a theme in the Goethe scholarship, Gustafson uncovers networks of kinship based on love rather than blood and opens up many new channels for the consideration of love relations in literature� 3 Michaela Hohkamp’s “Do Sisters Have Brothers? ” is a very recent account of the differences in terms of property rights and inheritance. The historical distinctions between the two sibling designations are highly material� 4 I would like to thank all the participants in the 2015 GSA panels sponsored by the Family and Kinship Network, as well as the directors of the Network, present and past, and the editors of Colloquia Germanica � I also thank my four sisters, Carol, Nancy, Peggy, and Dee Dee, for my experiential knowledge of the topic� Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister 9 Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister Barbara Becker-Cantarino Ohio State University Abstract: The article focuses on independence, empathy, and loyalty in Bettine Brentano-von Arnim’s (1785-1859) relationship to her 19 siblings (in her father’s three marriages), especially to her sisters Kunigunde (Gunda, married name von Savigny), Ludovica, and Meline, and her symbiotic childhood friendship with brother Clemens Brentano� The kinship ties in this extended family reveal an at times dysfunctional, patchwork family� Nevertheless, emotional ties between sisters and strong feelings of loyalty and responsibility for family members throughout adulthood enabled this upper-middle-class family to acquire economic, cultural, and individual capital and provided a space for female relationships and self-development. (In German) Keywords: Clemens Brentano, Bettine Brentano-von Arnim, bourgeois family, Frankfurt, gender, kinship, Sophie von La Roche, letters Wenige Wochen nach Achim von Arnims Tod am 21. Januar 1831 schrieb seine Frau Bettine aus Berlin an ihre Schwester: “Liebste Meline, Dein lieber Brief […] ist mir wieder ein Zeugniß daß es nicht umsonst ist wenn einer Mutter Schoos uns gebohren […]� Geschwister haben ein tieferes Band und die physische Natur ist eng verwandt mit der geistigen” (Püschel 163). Bettine von Arnim suchte nach dem plötzlichen, gänzlich unerwarteten Tod des erst Fünfzigjährigen Achims in Wiepersdorf Trost in Briefen an Geschwister und ihr nahestehende Freunde, indem sie gemeinschaftliche Verbindungen und Beziehungen erinnerte - hier gerichtet an ihre jüngere Schwester Meline in ihrer Heimatstadt Frankfurt, wo sie einige gemeinsame Jahre der Kindheit verlebt hatten� Geschwister- und Familienbande sind ein wichtiges Thema in den privaten Briefen der Romantiker, der ersten kommunikationsfreudigen Generation von Briefstellern, die ihre eigenen Gefühle artikulieren und reflektieren. Die “Briefdichterin” (Härtl 15) Bet- 10 Barbara Becker-Cantarino tine von Arnim hat ein Lebenswerk von expressiven Briefen hinterlassen, das gerade auch Geschwisterbeziehungen in der Frankfurter Großfamilie der Brentanos, in der sie aufgewachsen ist, beleuchtet� Bettine von Arnim wurde 1785 als dreizehntes Kind Peter Anton Brentanos und dessen zweiter Frau Maximiliane, geb� von La Roche geboren, sieben weitere Geschwister kamen noch nach ihr� Bettines Mutter starb 1793 bei der Geburt ihres zwölften Kindes (Bettine war damals sieben Jahre alt), ihr Vater starb schon vier Jahre später� Ich möchte hier die komplexen Geschwisterbeziehungen Bettines innerhalb dieser Großfamilie auf der Grundlage von Selbstzeugnissen, zumeist Briefen vorstellen, um die Netzwerke zwischen Geschwistern und besonders auch zwischen den immer im Schatten von Brüdern stehenden Schwestern näher zu beleuchten� Dabei gehe ich von der These aus, dass die Geschwisterbeziehungen Bettines in einem Spannungsverhältnis zwischen jugendlicher Rebellion, der Auflehnung gegen die Zwänge des Familienverbandes einerseits, der Suche nach Selbstständigkeit und Empathie, dem Gefühl von Freundschaft, menschlicher Nähe und Geborgenheit andererseits stehen� Ich skizziere dazu in drei Abschnitten einmal kurz die Großfamilie Peter Anton Brentanos und Bettines Stellung darin, dann Bettines Beziehung zu ihren Brüdern, besonders Clemens aus gendersensibler Perspektive und Bettines Beziehung zu den ihr altersmäßig nahestehenden Schwestern, besonders Meline. Abschließend gehe ich auf die genderspezifischen und historisch relevanten Aspekte von Geschwisterbeziehungen um 1800 ein� Kinship - Verwandtschaft oder Familie im weiteren Sinne - war immer ein wichtiger Faktor in Europa, der auch im Übergang zur Moderne keineswegs an Bedeutung verloren, sondern bemerkenswerte Modifikationen erfahren hat, wie David Sabean / Simon Teuscher jetzt wieder betont haben� Seit etwa der Mitte des 18� Jahrhunderts hat eine langsame Umorientierung in den Familien begonnen, “the structures stressing descent, inheritance, and succession, patrilines, agnatic lineages, and clans, paternal authority, house discipline, and exogamy gradually gave way to patterns centered around alliance, sentiment, interlocking networks of kindred, and social and familial endogamy” (16). Das führte nicht unbedingt nur zu einer Bildung von Klein- oder Kernfamilie, sondern auch zu großen Familienverbänden, Patrizierfamilien in Großstädten wie die Brentanos in Frankfurt, die ökonomisch, gesellschaftlich und dann auch politisch einflussreich wurden. Allein der Familienname “Brentano” signalisierte deren Bedeutung� 1 Dazu gehörten Aufbau und Pflege familialer Beziehungen, man sah auf kompatible Verbindungen zwischen den Ehepartnern - nicht nur finanziell und standesgemäß sondern auch emotional, moralisch und religiös� Wichtig wurden Patenschaften, Kinderbetreuung, Pflege, Erziehung und Einweisung innerhalb der Familie, Vormundschaften, rechtliche Abmachungen und gegenseitige Unterstützung im Austausch für Hilfeleistungen� Damit wurden Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister 11 auch die stützenden zwischenmenschlichen Beziehungen wichtiger wie Liebe, Freundschaft, Vertrauen, Respekt, Verständnis, kompatible Persönlichkeit, harmonisches Zusammenleben und der ‘gute Ruf ’ einer Familie. Diese Leitvorstellungen traten neben rein ökonomische Interessen, gingen Hand-in- Hand mit Anspruch auf Geltung, Vermögensbildung und Machtinteressen der Familie und einzelner Vertreter. Genderspezifisch gesehen wurden damit auch die vorher wenig Beachteten wie Schwestern, unverheiratete, früh verwaiste oder verarmte Mitglieder einer Familie - und das waren zumeist die weniger bedeutenden, weiblichen - sichtbar und erlangten einen neuen Stellenwert in Familie und Gesellschaft� Auf diesen Aspekt hat auch Eva Labouvie hingewiesen in ihrer Untersuchung zu schwesterlichen Netzwerken Schwestern und Freundinnen. Zur Kulturgeschichte weiblicher Kommunikation , wenn sie den Beginn von intensivem Austausch in häuslichen und befreundeten Kreisen über Briefkontakte und Briefwechsel im 18� Jahrhundert mit der Bildung des “Freundschaftskultes unter den Angehörigen beider Geschlechter” beschreibt: Nicht mehr konventionelle Motive sollten den Ausschlag für eine nahe Beziehung, für schwesterliche Verbindungen oder Freundschaften abgeben, sondern subjektive Empfindungen, kulturell vermittelt als neue Leitideen der “Seelenverwandtschaft” und “Herzensfreundschaft”� Neben der Ehe aus Liebe entfalteten sich im letzten Drittel des 18� Jahrhunderts die Freundschaft und die Geschwisterliebe zu Idealen von ungemeiner Anziehungskraft. (12) Diese eröffnete neue Chancen für die Begegnung und Annäherung der Geschlechter besonders in familialen Beziehungen� Nicht nur die Gender Studies, sondern auch die Soziologie, die Geschichtswissenschaft und besonders die Anthropologie haben der Verwandtschaft, wie Familie im engeren Sinne, als strukturierender Faktor sozialer Beziehungen während der letzten Jahrzehnte wieder viel Aufmerksamkeit geschenkt, gleichwohl dieses Untersuchungsfeld ehedem geradezu eine Domäne der Anthropologen war, und die ältere These von der linearen Entwicklung und Dominanz der Kleinfamilie als Modernisierungsprozess Europas relativiert� Die Umstrukturierung von Kinship entwickelte im späten 18� Jahrhundert eine Dynamik, die das lokale Milieu neu vernetzt und zu der Bildung der Klassengesellschaft des 19� Jahrhunderts geführt hat, die grundlegend für Kapitalbildung und wirtschaftliche Entwicklung waren und den Mechanismus für die politische und kulturelle Elitenbildung und deren Regenerierung bildeten (Sabean / Teuscher 24). Die Brentano-Familie kann exemplarisch für wohlsituierte Bürgerfamilien im ausgehenden 18� Jahrhundert angesehen werden, wie sie etwa die Historikerinnen Rebecca Habermas in Frauen und Männer des Bürgertums für die Nürnberger Kaufmannsfamilie Merkel und die Stuttgarter Beamtenfamilie Roth und Ann 12 Barbara Becker-Cantarino Charlott Trepp in ihrer Studie Sanfte Männlichkeit und selbständige Weiblichkeit � Frauen und Männer im Hamburger Bürgertum zwischen 1770 und 1840 über mehrere Generationen hin untersucht haben� Die Familien waren kinderreich, waren vielfach das, was heute als eine Patchwork-Familie bezeichnet wird, und hatten starke funktionale Strukturen aber durchaus auch dysfunktionale Aspekte für einzelne Familienmitglieder und enge Beziehungen oder (oft kontroverse) Verknüpfungen unter Geschwistern� Bettine Brentanos Vater Peter Anton Brentano (1736-1797), selbst das zehnte Kind seiner Mutter, die ein knappes Jahr später als 36Jährige nach der Geburt des elften Kindes verstarb, in Tremezzo am Comer See geboren und aufgewachsen, war zwischen seiner Heirat in Frankfurt 1763 und seinem Todesjahr 1797 auch der Vater von zwanzig Kindern in drei Ehen� Seine erste Frau stammte nicht mehr aus der Heimat der Brentanos Italien, sondern war die bei der Heirat 1760 (damals 18jährige) Maria Josepha Walburga Brentano-Gnosso, die Tochter eines Geschäftspartners, die in Frankfurt geboren und aufgewachsen war. Nach Walburga Brentanos frühem Tod (im Kindbett bei der Geburt des sechsten Kindes 1770) heiratete Peter Anton Brentano in seiner kulturell gesehen wichtigsten Ehe 1773 die damals 17jährige Maximiliane von La Roche, deren Vater Konferenzminister (und ab 1778) Staatskanzler beim Kurfürsten Clemens Wenzeslaus von Trier war und dessen Nobilitierung 1775 von Kaiser Joseph II � bestätigt wurde� Brentanos Verbindung mit dem ebenfalls katholischen Hofbeamten des benachbarten Kurfürstentums war wichtig für seine gesellschaftliche Stellung: Brentano wurde durch diese Beziehung zum kurtrierischen Rat und Resident in der Freien Reichsstadt Frankfurt ernannt und bald darauf (vom Kaiser) nobilitiert� Die durchaus auch menschlich harmonische und produktive Ehe (zwölf Kinder! ) mit Maximiliane von La Roche, deren Mutter Sophie von La Roche als Schriftstellerin Berühmtheit erlangt hatte, haben den gesellschaftlichen Status der Frankfurter Brentanos grundlegend verändert� In der vorangehenden Generation waren die Brentanos italienische Migranten ohne Bürgerrecht, mit Peter Anton wurden sie zu Honoratioren und Patriziern, das Handelshaus zu einem der reichsten Frankfurts� Die Brentano-Familien waren fast immer kinderreich, hatten hohe Geburtsraten, hohe Müttersterblichkeit, aber die Kindersterblichkeit war (für das 18� Jahrhundert) gering, was auf gute Versorgung, Ernährung und Kinderpflege - den Quellen nach durch die Mütter und weiblichen Familienangehörigen selbst - schließen lässt� Dazu kam sorgfältige Erziehung der Kinder mit Privatunterricht, für alle männlichen Familienangehörigen Anleitung und Einarbeitung in das (eigene oder von Verwandten betriebene) Geschäft oder einen Beruf, zuweilen auch ein Studium (Christian und Clemens Brentano) und eine Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister 13 Ausbildung bei einem Verwandten (Clemens). Die Mädchen wurden auf die Ehe und Haushaltsführung im eigenen oder einem Verwandten-Haushalt vorbereitet, erhielten Privatunterricht in Sprachen, Musik, Zeichnen und gesellschaftlichen Umgangsformen, um in eine standesgemäße Heirat vermittelt und versorgt zu werden. Bettine Brentano brach aus diesem Muster aus und verschaffte sich selbst außerdem Hebräisch-Unterricht von einem Juden in Frankfurt und professionellen Gesangs- und Kompositionsunterricht bei ihrem Aufenthalt in München� Dreizehn Kinder aus den drei Ehen Peter Anton Brentanos erreichten das Erwachsenenalter (seine beiden ersten Ehefrauen starben im Kindbett, Maximiliane - Bettines Mutter - nach den Geburten von drei nicht lebensfähigen, dicht aufeinanderfolgenden Kindern 1790, 1791 und 1793)� Die heranwachsenden Brentano-Kinder entwickelten sich zu interessanten, eigenwilligen Persönlichkeiten im gesellschaftlichen und kulturellen Leben, darunter die bekannten Romantiker Clemens Brentano und Bettine (verh.) von Arnim, sowie der als Geschäftsmann glänzende zweitälteste Sohn Franz (aus Peter Antons erster Ehe), der schon seit 1785 - dem Geburtsjahr Bettines - die Brentanosche Handlung mit Gewürzen, Spezereien und anderen Luxusgütern leitete� Er wurde unterstützt von Georg (1775-1851), dem ältesten Sohn aus Peter Antons Ehe mit Maximiliane; die beiden Brüder konnten gemeinsam das riesige Vermögen der Familie noch vergrößern, so dass alle Brentano-Kinder ihr Leben lang finanziell gut versorgt waren, obwohl die Napoleonischen Kriege wirtschaftlich Krisen verursachten, in denen viele Vermögen vernichtet wurden und große Handelshäuser bankrott gingen� Bettine verlebte ihre Kindheit von 1785 bis 1793 zunächst unbeschwert im “Goldenen Kopf ”, dem stattlichen Stammhaus der Brentanos mit Büro und Lagerräumen, mit den anderen Geschwistern zusammen� Im “Goldenen Kopf ” gab es noch die für das 18� Jahrhundert charakteristische enge Verbindung von Arbeits- und Wohnbereich, die zur Komplexität der Brentanoschen Familie beitrug. Nach dem Tode ihrer Mutter 1793 und vor seiner Wiederheirat schickte der Vater Bettine mit zwei ihrer Schwestern, der zwei Jahre jüngeren Lulu (Ludovica, 1787-1859) und drei Jahre jüngeren Meline (Magdalena, 1788-1861) in das Pensionat der Ursulinen in Wetzlar. Nach dem Tod des Vaters 1797 kam Bettine mit Lulu und Meline zur Großmutter La Roche ins benachbarte Offenbach; Bettine machte öfters Besuche in Frankfurt, übersiedelte 1802 endgültig wieder dorthin. Sie nahm dann vielfach teil an Ausflügen ins Rheinland (Winkel und Rödelsheim, den Landsitzen der Brüder Franz und Georg), nach Trages (dem Landgut Savignys), nach Offenbach (Großmutter La Roche starb dort erst 1807) und zu den (inzwischen verheirateten) älteren Schwestern: Die Winter 1805 und 1806 verlebte sie mit Meline in Marburg, wo ihre fünf Jahre ältere 14 Barbara Becker-Cantarino Schwester Gunda (Kunigunde,1780-1863) lebte, die seit 1804 mit Carl Friedrich von Savigny (1779-1861) verheiratet war; 1807 besuchte sie ihre Schwester Lulu in Kassel, die mit dem Bankier Jordis verheiratet dort lebte� Die Jordis nahmen Bettine auf eine Geschäftsreise nach Berlin (mit Abstecher nach Weimar zu Goethe) mit� Dann kehrte Bettine nach Frankfurt zurück, lebte seit 1807 bei den Savignys in München und Landshut und reiste mit ihnen 1810 (über Prag, Gut Bukowan und Teplitz) nach Berlin, wo sie 1811 Achim von Arnim heiratete� Es waren (auch politisch) unruhige aber prägende Jahre für Bettines Beziehung zu den Geschwistern, für ihr Verhältnis zur Großfamilie der Brentanos und für ihre eigene Entwicklung� Die Großfamilie war ständig “in Bewegung”, die (älteren) Kinder, nahe Verwandte und Besucher gingen im Goldenen Kopf ein und aus� In Bettines Frankfurter Zeit lebten dort der älteste (Stief)Bruder Peter Anton (1763-1833), der als nicht “ganz gescheut” galt 2 und an dessen Stelle der zweitgeborene Sohn Franz (1765-1844) das Familienoberhaupt wurde. Bettinas (Stief)Bruder Dominikus (1769-1825), der ‘Doktor’ genannt wegen seines juristischen Studiums, und die Stiefschwester Paula (1770-1805, bis zu deren Verheiratung 1800) lebten in Frankfurt� Das Regiment hatte Franz, der 20 Jahre - fast eine Generation - älter als Bettine war und 1797 beim Tod des Vaters Bettines Vormund und Chef des Hauses wurde. 1798 heiratete Franz die junge Wienerin Antonia (Toni) von Birckenstock (1780-1869), Tochter eines hohen Hofbeamten und Kunstsammlers, die nun die Stelle der Hausmutter einnahm und sich besonders um die heranwachsenden Mädchen (Paula, Sophie, Gunda, Bettine, Meline), deren häusliche Erziehung und Verheiratung, kümmerte, was aber auch die älteren Brüder taten� Aus der zweiten Brentano-Ehe lebten im “Goldenen Kopf ” Bettines ältester Bruder Georg, ab 1803 verheiratet mit Marie Schröder, und Bettines älteste Schwester Sophie (1776-1800), dort ab 1790, vertrat besonders nach dem Tod der Mutter 1793 die Mutterstelle für ihre jüngeren Geschwister, verstarb aber unerwartet und ungeklärt bei einem Besuch bei Wieland auf Gut Oßmannstedt bei Weimar 1790. 3 Auch Bruder Christian (1784-1851), sowie Schwester Gunda (bis zu deren Heirat 1804) verbrachten ihre Kindheit im “Goldenen Kopf ”, die jüngeren mit langen Unterbrechungen bei Verwandten� Bruder Clemens, der (wie unten gezeigt wird) sich besonders um Bettine bemühte und ihr bis zu seiner Heirat 1803 besonders nahe stand, ging dort ein und aus� Diese bunte Großfamilie sei “ungemein ruhig in ihrer Art” gewesen, es sei “seltsam dass die Brentanosche Familie sich in Repräsentanten der größten Ruhe und in solche der außerordentlichen Unruhe theilte […]� Alle hielten innig zusammen”, so urteilte Hermann Grimm, der Schwiegersohn Bettines, 1896 aus späterer, leicht verklärender Retroperspektive (Steinsdorff 193). Es war keinesfalls eine Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister 15 in sich geschlossene, harmonische Familienidylle, sondern ein changierendes familiales Netzwerk, das von dem Bewusstsein der Zugehörigkeit, der Familie als Anker - oder wechselweise auch als Mühlstein oder Gefängnis, getragen wurde. Bei allen Brentanos war die Familienloyalität und Identifizierung mit den Brentanos - trotz religiöser und weltanschaulicher Divergenzen in Bettines Generation - stark ausgeprägt� Heitere, unspektakuläre Kinderbzw� Jugend-Szenen erscheinen zwar wenig in den publizierten Quellen, dafür in den nicht-publizierten Briefen, dürften deshalb durchaus zum Alltag der Großfamilie gehört haben� Hier ein Beispiel aus einem frühen überlieferten Brief Bettines aus Frankfurt an Savigny “vom Fest auf Antons namenstag, da wir seinen Wellenbaum [Regenschirm] auf das zierlichste mit Blumen und Geschencken schmückten und kränzten, und ihn aufgespannt in einen großen Radan Kuchen [Napfkuchen] steckten mitten auf dem Estriche - mit schönen Versen in höchster Eil verfertiget� und Anton uns zur Revanche mit Vilbler Wasser und Wasser Tracktierte” (Brief vom 2. 7. 1806; Arnim 4, 38). 1803 formulierte Bruder Christian sein vages Wunschbild von der Familie in einem Brief an Bruder Clemens: “Es ist eine meiner liebsten Hoffnungen in unserem Hause einst wieder eine fröhliche und einige Geselligkeit zu sehen, denn alle fanden wir uns noch nie zusammen” (Arnim 1, 818). Bettine äußerte sich als knapp 19Jährige, sie fühle sich wie ein großer Krieger, “dem das Herz glühet zu großen Unternehmungen und Thaten, und der in der Gefangenschaft ist mit Ketten beladen an keine Rettung denken darf, mir überwältigt diese rastlose Begierde nach Wirken oft die Seele und ich bin doch nur ein einfältig Mädgen, deren Bestimmung ganz anders ist” (An Savigny aus Frankfurt, Mitte Sept� 1804; Arnim 4, 14)� Das Bild erinnert an ähnliche Gedanken von Bettines derzeitiger Freundin Karoline von Günderrode, erinnert an die Unsicherheit und Aufbruchsstimmung in den Napoleonischen Kriegen, thematisiert jedoch auch Bettines Abhängigkeit von der Familie und von ihrer Geschlechterrolle, passiv und enttäuscht auf die Ehe als Versorgung warten zu müssen (Savigny hatte gerade Schwester Gunda geheiratet nach früheren Fühlern zu Bettine)� Die Brentano-Familie war ein lebendiges, geselliges, ständig sich veränderndes, stärkendes und auch hinderliches Netzwerk, das durch die persönliche Autorität des Vaters bzw� dessen männlichen Erben und deren Ökonomie zusammengehalten wurde, ohne starke Mutterfigur aber mit mütterlicher Fürsorge besonders durch die weiblichen Mitglieder und praktischer, autoritärer Verantwortung von Seiten der Brüder� Bettine hatte eine vertrauensvolle, zumeist freundschaftliche Beziehung zu ihren Brüdern, die ihrerseits die Vormundrolle spielten, den Vater aber wohl kaum ersetzen konnten, sie zu bilden und lenken versuchten und sich für sie 16 Barbara Becker-Cantarino wie auch für die anderen Schwestern verantwortlich fühlten� Die Bezeichnung ‘Stiefbruder’ oder ‘Stiefschwester’ fehlt in den Briefquellen, wohl ein Zeichen dafür, dass die Geschwister (und deren Ehepartner) sich ohne Unterschied als Brentanos fühlten, ihre jeweilige Stellung im Familienverband je nach Alter und Geschlecht einnahmen und ausübten� Die individuellen Beziehungen waren darüber hinaus, wie zu erwarten, durch persönliche Gefühle und Sympathien bzw. Antipathien und Verhaltensweisen geprägt. Franz (und Frau Toni) handelten autoritär gegenüber den Geschwistern; Bettine akzeptierte nolens volens die Autorität der männlichen und der älteren Familienglieder, wenn die 24Jährige im Brief an Clemens ihren Bruder zurechtwies: “Du magst es nun Schwachheit nennen oder was Du willst so bin ich durchaus unfähig etwas, was dem Savigny, Anstössig ist zu unternehmen, er hat mich auf meine Ehrlichkeit trauend [nach München] mitgenommen”, denn Savigny sei “schuldig, dem Franz und Consorten dem dieß allerdings nicht als etwas honetes einleuchten würde, Rechenschaft über mich abzulegen, ich versichere Dich, daß ich gerade deswegen viel eher in Franckfurth selbst fähig wäre meinen Willen durchzusetzen, als hier wieder Savignys willen” (Brief an Clemens aus München am 24. 6. 1809; Arnim 4, 79)� Mit Konsorten waren hier neben Vormund Franz auch generell die Frankfurter Brentano-Familie gemeint; auch auf ihre Gastgeber, den Schwager Savigny und die mit ihm verheiratete ältere Schwester Gunda, war Rücksicht zu nehmen� Später jedoch, als Bettine erwachsen und verheiratet war, sah sie auf die Frankfurter Jahre und die Brüder mit Dankbarkeit zurück und hatte ein besonders gutes Verhältnis zu ihrem ältesten Bruder Georg, der kunst- und musikinteressiert war und eine beachtliche Kunstsammlung anlegte, aber nicht in der städtischen Politik tätig war� Bettine besuchte ihn öfters von Berlin aus auf dem Gut Rödelsheim; ihre zwei ältesten Töchter Maximiliane und Armgart ließ sie von 1829 bis 1834 bei Georg in Frankfurt zur Erziehung� Kompliziert und wechselvoll war Bettines Beziehung zu dem sechseinhalb Jahre älteren Lieblings-Bruder ihrer Kindheit, Clemens (1778-1842), der sich gegen den Vater und jegliche Autorität auflehnte und sich häufig über den prosaischen Kaufmannsgeist der Brentanos beklagte. Als Franz ihm (nach zwei fehlgeschlagenen Kaufmannslehren und drei Studiengängen ohne Abschluss) vorhielt: “Zum Kaufmann taugst du nicht” erwiderte Clemens “ich verzinse mit anderen Interessen als ihr” (Brief an Schwester Sophie; Schultz 1983, 246). Der kreativ begabte, kapriziöse, sprunghafte, rebellische Clemens war der “schwarze Schmetterling” (Schultz 2000) der Brentanos. Clemens war als Sechsjähriger zusammen mit seiner ältesten Schwester Sophie von 1784 bis 1790 (mit knapp einem Jahr Unterbrechung) zu seiner Tante Luise von Möhn, geb� La Roche, in Koblenz geschickt worden und dort “in Jahren kindlichen Leids” aufgewachsen Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister 17 (Schellberg / Fuchs 21); die kinderlose Tante soll zu streng gewesen sein, sie war unglücklich verheiratet mit einem hohen Hofbeamten, einem alkoholsüchtigen, gewalttätigen Spieler� 4 Als Clemens’ enge Bindung an Schwester Sophie durch ihren unerwarteten Tod jäh beendet wurde, übertrug er den “brüderlichen Liebesbund mit Sophie” auf die “Geschwisterfreundschaft mit Bettine” (Arnim 1, 801) und, wie der beste Clemens Brentano-Kenner Hartwig Schultz in seiner Clemens-Biografie zeigt, versuchte Clemens die “Geliebte Bettine in einer Art geschwisterlichen 5 Verschwörung dem Einfluss der Frankfurter Brüder weitgehend zu entziehen” (Schultz 2004, 35). Clemens bestürmte die knapp 15jährige Bettine mit seinem in Poesie und Literatur gekleideten Liebeswerben; Großmutter La Roche und Schwägerin Toni waren um Bettines guten Ruf besorgt und von Clemens’ Verhalten alarmiert, da Clemens schon derzeit in vielen “Liebeshändeln” engagiert war (Schellberg / Fuchs 264). Clemens’ heftige, schwärmerische Liebesbeteuerungen in vielen wortreichen Briefen an Bettine bezeugen die inzestuösen Neigungen in dieser Geschwisterbeziehung� 6 In diesen Gefühlsausbrüchen und Verwirrungen versuchte Clemens auch, Bettine als Ehefrau einem seiner Freunde zu vermitteln, darunter an Savigny, der aber die besonnene, praktische Gunda vorzog, und anderen Bekannten der Familie� Clemens bemühte sich dann, seinen besten Freund Arnim mit Bettine zu verbinden. Erst Clemens’ Heirat 1804 mit Sophie Mereau beendete die enge Gefühlgemeinschaft mit Schwester Bettine, die sich von nun an gefühlsmäßig von Clemens distanzierte, jedoch dann mit pragmatischen Lösungen für Clemens’ chaotische zweite Ehe mit Auguste Bußmann 7 und der späteren Scheidung half. Bettine wies Clemens während dessen Eskapaden (seine zweite Frau loszuwerden) zurecht, half aber auch, soweit sie konnte� Clemens bezog nahezu sein gesamtes Umfeld in seine Beziehungs- und Ehekrisen mit ein und klatschte schamlos und herablassend über seine Frauen in Briefen an Dritte� Ganz geheim und hinter Clemens’ Rücken entwickelte sich dann eine Liebe zwischen Arnim und Bettine, während Clemens schon Max Prokop von Freyberg als Bettines Bräutigam ausgab, als Bettine im fernen München 1809 eine emotionale briefliche Beziehung zu dem politisch engagierten Landshuter Studenten und Freiheitskämpfer unterhielt� Bettine und Arnim scheinen gemeinsam beschlossen zu haben, Clemens nicht in ihren Lebensbund einzubeziehen� Ihre heimliche Trauung am 11. März 1811, als Arnim ohne ein Wort zu sagen aus seiner Wohngemeinschaft mit Clemens in Berlin auszog, kränkte Clemens, der sich hintergangen, ausgeschlossen und alleingelassen fühlte� Clemens versuchte dann immer wieder, in die eheliche Vertrauensgemeinschaft Bettines mit Achim aufgenommen zu werden, machte etliche Besuche in Wiepersdorf und unternahm mehrere poetische Aktivitäten mit Arnim� Ab 1816 entstand dann eine totale Entfremdung der Geschwister aus unüberwindbaren politischen und 18 Barbara Becker-Cantarino religiösen Differenzen, als Clemens sich in Berlin der neupietistischen Gruppe um die Gebrüder Gerlach und an die protestantische Pfarrerstochter Luise Hensel und später orthodox-katholischen Kreisen anschloss� Clemens setzte bei allen Konflikten mit der Familie, die Skandale vermeiden und den guten Ruf bewahren wollte, seinen Willen durch, doch kam es nie zum Bruch� Die Brüder haben unterstützt von den Schwestern vielfach Clemens zur Vernunft ermahnt, besonders Bettine hat ihn beraten und Franz und Georg haben sein Leben lang Clemens’ Erbe verwaltet und vermehrt, sodass er allein von den Zinsen seines Vermögens leben konnte (Schultz 1983, 253-55). Der wankelmütige, unstete Clemens hatte dennoch einen starken Familiensinn, fand immer wieder Halt in den Geschwistern, die ihrerseits ihn immer zu unterstützen versuchten� In seiner “poesiegeleiteten Existenz” (Arnim 1, 801) hatte Clemens in seinem ersten Roman Godwi oder das steinerne Bild der Mutter. Ein verwildeter Roman von Maria (1801 / 02) seine Schwestern Bettine und Meline, die jüngste und eine außergewöhnliche Schönheit, mythisiert in Anlehnung an die Romanfigur Annonciata als “die Macht des Lebens” für Bettine und die Romanfigur Marie mit Marien-Ikonografie für Meline (Steinsdorff 183-85). In diesen Jahren versuchte Clemens auch, seine begabte Schwester Bettine zum Dichten zu ermutigen - nicht um ihr zu selbständiger Autorschaft zu verhelfen, sondern im Rahmen des zeitgenössisch akzeptablen Schreibens für Frauen, das das Verfassen von Briefen oder bestenfalls die Ausführung männlicher Schreibaufträge akzeptierte� “Erst in der Verinnerlichung dieser Ordnungsraster kann die Frau zu der von Clemens beschworenen ›Freiheit‹ gelangen - einer Freiheit, die idealiter in der willentlichen Übernahme weiblich codierter Formen von Autorschaft und dem ebenso willentlichen Verzicht auf Übergriffe in die männliche Domäne von zur Publikation bestimmter Literaturproduktion zur Vollendung gelang” (Landfester). Als Bettine mit ihrem Goethe-Buch als Schriftstellerin in die Öffentlichkeit trat, war die Frankfurter Familie empört und Clemens, dem Bettine die ersten Druckbögen geschickt hatte, kritisierte die Erotik: “Daß Du nicht wohl erzogen auf dem Sopha sitzen kannst und Dich übel erzogen auf eines Mannes Schooß setzest […] weder Achim noch Goethe würden eine solche Veröffentlichung gebilligt haben, und wie Savigny als Vormund der Kinder es konnte, weiß ich auch nicht […] Goethe war ein verehelichter Mann” (Arnim, Härtl, 693). Trotz Clemens’ Kritik an Bettines Werk und ihrer unterschiedlichen Lebensauffassung nahm Bettine jedoch den Briefwechsel mit ihm wieder auf, als sie die Herausgabe der Werke von Achim plante und den Bruder um Mithilfe und Genehmigung der Publikation gemeinsamer Arbeiten aus den Heidelberger Jahren wie Des Knaben Wunderhorn und die Zeitung für Einsiedler plante . Bettine versuchte an die gemeinsame Jugend anzuknüpfen, als sie an Clemens im Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister 19 April 1839 schrieb: “Sollen wir uns wiedersehen, so wollen wir im Sinn unserer jugendlichen Geschwisterliebe mit einander sein” (Arnim 4, 362). Clemens ließ dann Bettine die Ausgabe der Werke Achim von Arnims ganz nach ihren Wünschen planen; die Geschwister trafen dann aber nicht mehr wieder zusammen, denn Clemens starb bereits 1842 im Haus seines Bruders Christian in Aschaffenburg� Deutliche Verstimmung gab es dann mit Bruder Christian, den der kinderlose Clemens zum Universalerben seines literarischen Werkes eingesetzt hatte; Bettine verabscheute Christians religiös-publizistische Arbeiten� In dem Nachlass-Streit mit Bruder Christian forderte Bettine die Rückgabe ihrer Briefe an Clemens und bestand auf der Herausgabe des Briefwechsels, wie sie ihrem Bruder Georg erklärte: Den Briefwechsel zwischen ihm [Clemens] und mir werde ich ohne irgendeine Nebenverantwortung herausgeben; so darf auch keiner darum sich kränken� Es geht ins Komische daß Ihr mit blindem Glauben an die Nichtswürdigkeit dieser Correspondenz und mit solcher Überspannung ein schreckliches Lamento erhebt dagegen. Wenn ich sie jetzt nicht wollte herausgeben, so müßte man Wunder glauben welche Verderbtheit in meinem jugendlichen Alter schon in mir war, daß ich mit so viel Feuer dem Clemens zugetan war, daß ich nur ihm glaubte, nur seinem Wort folgte jeden Wink von ihm wie (un)widerlegliche Weisheit benützte die Welt verstehen zu lernen. Denn Ihr wißt es ja alle miteinander daß er den größten Einfluß auf mich hatte. Das Mannigfaltige Widersprechende Dunkle und Helle in mir hat er geordnet durch sein Antreiben und Fördern� Sag es Deiner Sophie 8 daß sie unrecht hat so voreilig zu verzweiflen und das Schlimmste zu erwarten von Erscheinungen im Geist zweier geistreicher ganz edler und Seelenvoll verbündeter Naturen dazu berechtigt keine Frömmigkeit� Immerfort Deine treue Schwester, die gern mit Dir ihr Leben theilen würde, und gewiß würde sie sich manches Verdienst um Dich erwerben wär es ihr vergönnt mit Dir zu sein� Bettine Auch dem Christian sag das beste von meinem herzlichen Willen zu ihm. (Brief vom 5. 3. 1844; Arnim 4, 483 f.) Aus der Erwachsenenperspektive fast vierzig Jahre später blickte Bettine dankbar und verständnisvoll auf ihren Lieblingsbruder und ihre jugendliche Beziehung zu Clemens zurück, gab sich versöhnlich mit Georg, dessen Familie sie öfter in Frankfurt besucht hatte und als ihr ,Elternhaus’ betrachtete. Aber sie handelte nach eigenem Ermessen und Urteil: ihr Briefwechsel mit Clemens erschien dann in der vor ihr gestalteten Form 9 als Clemens Brentano’s Frühlingskranz aus Jugendbriefen ihm geflochten, wie er selbst schriftlich verlangte schon im Mai 1844� Sie verewigte damit das Andenken an ihren Bruder in dem Bild aus ihrer Jugendzeit vor seiner religiösen Wende. Sie wollte ihre Ansicht vom 20 Barbara Becker-Cantarino Leben und Werk des Dichters Clemens Brentano darlegen, auch um dem Editionsmonopol des Universalerben Christian entgegenzutreten� Anders als die erotisch komplizierte Beziehung zu Bruder Clemens und teilweise konfliktreich-aufbegehrende Beziehung zu ihren älteren Brüdern, war Bettines Verhältnis besonders eng und herzlich mit ihren altersmäßig nahestehen Schwestern, mit denen sie einige Jahre zusammen aufgewachsen war, Gunda, Lulu und Meline. Bettines jüngste Schwester Meline (Magdalena Maria Karolina Franziska Brentano, 1788-1861) “war ungemein ruhig in ihrer Art” (Steinsdorff 183), galt als das ganze Gegenteil von der lebendigen, exzentrischen Bettine� Sie wurde von den älteren Geschwistern umsorgt, betreut und auch eingeschüchtert, von der Frankfurter Familie zu konventionellen Verpflichtungen genötigt (Visiten bei Honoratioren und hatte immer ‘Toiletten-Sorgen’ um das standesgemäße Erscheinen), war unzufrieden, fühlte sich isoliert und allein gelassen, oft kränkelnd mit Kopfschmerzen, ist “zurückgeschreckt” bei den “Neckereyen” der älteren Geschwister (Steinsdorff 185). Auch Bettine krittelte und kommandierte die jüngere Meline herum� Es gab durchaus Differenzen bei den unterschiedlichen Persönlichkeiten der beiden. So berichtete Meline 1806 (aus Winkel) an die Savignys, die sie 1804-1805 nach Paris als Stütze für Schwester Gunda und deren erstgeborene Tochter Bettina begleitet hatte, über die Entfremdung der beiden: Die Bettine und ich passen gar nicht zusammen, ich bin ihr in allem, bis auf die geringste Kleinigkeit ganz entgegengesetzt; wie sollte sie daher wissen was mir nöthig thut; Ich kenne die Bettine nur wenig, sie kennt mich nur wenig […]. Wir lieben uns gegenseitig, weil wir uns nicht im Wege stehen. […] Ich habe die gröste Achtung für ihren Verstand, den ich verehren aber nicht begreifen kann […]� Ins Bürgerlich, worin ich stehe kann sie nicht einsehen. (Steinsdorff 193 f.) Melines Briefe (über 100 aus Frankfurt gerichtet an die Savignys für 1806 / 07, und etwa 50 für 1808 / 09 haben sich erhalten) zeigen sie als realitätsbezogene Chronistin der Ereignisse in der Frankfurter Familie, die Bettines vielfach poetisch umrankte Darstellungen in ihren späteren Briefbüchern sachlich schildern� Meline widersetzte sich der Vermengung von poetischer Fiktion und Wirklichkeit, den “fixen Luftideen”, und strebte bewusst eine bürgerliche Konvenienzehe an. Sie empfand es als Vorwurf, noch nicht versorgt (verheiratet) zu sein, heiratete dann 1810 den sechzehn Jahre älteren Kaufmann Georg Friedrich von Guaita (1772-1851) aus der reichen, ebenfalls aus Italien stammenden Handelsfamilie, der später Senator und Bürgermeister Frankfurts wurde - der perfekte Match für Meline zur Zufriedenheit aller Brentanos, trotz der Krittelei von Clemens und Bettine an Guaita und Meline als ‘Philister’. Meline habe “sich Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister 21 das Denken schon längst verboten, um auch in ihren Ansichten nicht einmal gegen ihren Mann zu handlen”, spottete Bettine in einem (Privat)Brief an Achim 1821 (Stein 206; Achim und Bettina in ihren Briefen , 1, 315)� Dennoch blieb immer eine vertraute, familiäre Beziehung zu Meline bestehen, die zugleich Bettines Heimatstadt und kindliche Verbundenheit bedeutete� So berichtete Bettine in den frühen Jahren aus Berlin und Wiepersdorf lebendig über die Ereignisse im warmen ironischen Ton, wie Anfang Juli 1814 über den Landsturm und die Verteidigung Berlins: Bettine sehnte sich und fragt nach Neuigkeiten der Familie und Frankfurts, beschrieb, wie sie ihre ältesten Söhne Freimund und Siegmund selbst stillte und wieder schwanger war — weibliche und alltägliche Themen und Begebenheiten, die in früheren Briefeditionen zumeist ausgelassen wurden (Arnim 4, 159-65). Bettine blieb auch späterhin von Berlin aus mit Meline verbunden, die für ihre Geschwister zum Mittelpunkt der Familie wird, wenn sie wieder Frankfurt besuchen� Den geschwisterlichen Zusammenhalt zeigt Bettines schon eingangs zitierter Brief von 1831, in dem sie auf den Kondolenzbrief der Schwester Meline nach Achims Tod antwortete: Liebste Meline, Dein Brief hat mir Freude gemacht, es ist mir wieder ein Zeugniß daß es nicht umsonst ist wenn einer Mutter Schoos uns gebohren und daß wir uns mit ergriffen fühlen wenn sich gewaltiges mit einem Blutsverwandten ereignet; ja so etwas ist nicht umsonst� Geschwister haben ein tieferes Band und die physische Natur ist eng verbunden mit der geistigen; so kann ich Dir sagen, daß ich plötzlich eine Erinnerung gehabt von unserer Mutter gleich in den ersten Stunden wo ich wußte daß Arnim geschieden, und daß es mir war als habe sie Mitleid mit mir. Wer kann voraus ahnden, welcher Trost und welche Stärkung einem zufließt? […] Soll ich nun sagen es ist mir ein großes Unglück wiederfahren? Da ich doch anerkennen muß daß Gott mich heimgesucht hat; er hat mich gerufen und laut gerufen und seine Stimme schallt mächtig und erschüttert, daß Herz und Geist betäubt sind, aber die Thränen die fließen sind dem Thau zu vergleichen der im Frühling das Erdreich lockert um das Feuer der Sonne tief an die Wurzeln zu saugen, daß sie neu wieder hervorsprießen können […]. Ich bitte Dich herzlich grüße alle Geschwister und besonders den Klemens den Arnim nie aus dem Herzen gelaßen, so war er auch dem Christian sehr gut, grüße auch die Tony 10 und sage ihr daß wenn sie mir schreiben wollte so soll es mich freuen. (Püschel 1996, 163) Mit romantisch-religiösen Bildern wandte sich die (damals 46jährige) Bettine, deren jüngste ihrer sieben Kinder Gisela erst vier Jahre alt war, an die ihr nahestehende Schwester Meline und erinnerte an die Familienbande und die eigene Mutter� In der Erinnerung werden die Familienbande unter Frauen, zwischen Mutter und Tochter und zwischen Schwestern emotional verklärt� Dennoch zeigt der Brief, wie Geschwister Trost und Unterstützung in Lebenskrisen be- 22 Barbara Becker-Cantarino deuten, dass besonders enge Beziehungen zwischen Schwestern bestehen und dass diese oft lebenslang auch in der geografischen Entfernung bestehen bleiben und wichtige Bezugspunkte sind� Die Geschwisterbeziehungen in der Großfamilie Brentano sind ungemein lebendig, vielseitig und wechselhaft, angefangen von der Kinder- und Jugendzeit, durch das Erwachsenenalter hindurch bis zum Tod� Hier fallen die langen, dauerhaften Bande an die Familie auf, die dann auf die Kindergenerationen übertragen wurden, wozu sicher auch der gesellschaftliche Status und die stabile ökonomische Lage mit beitrugen. Trotz aller ‘Knüffe und Püffe’ untereinander, Entfremdungen und Missverständnissen, Klatsch und Besorgnis um den guten Ruf, solidarisierten sich alle Brentano-Kinder immer wieder mit der Familie, bzw� arrangierten sich in engerer Anlehnung an einen Bruder oder Schwester� Bettines Rebellion gegen die Frankfurter Familie in ihrer Jugend wurde durch Bruder Clemens unterstützt, gefördert (und in Clemens’ eigenen Briefen endlos ausgebreitet). Spätestens mit Clemens’ Heirat löste sie die enge, erotische Bruder-Schwester-Beziehung, als sie merkte wie Clemens Narzissmus und männliche Privilegien sie ausnutzten, da sie selbst anders als der Bruder durch zeitgenössische Gender-Konvention eingeengt war� Clemens war nicht zu einer Geschwister-Freundschaft - die auf Gleichheit, Gegenseitigkeit, und autonomer Persönlichkeit beruht - mit der jüngeren, erotisch attraktiven Schwester bereit oder fähig� Bettine fand im Erwachsenwerden zu weitgehender Selbstbestimmung und Selbstständigkeit, auch in ihrer Ehe� In ihren Schwester-Beziehungen (zu Gunda, Lulu und Meline) fand Bettine Empathie, das Gefühl von Freundschaft, menschlicher Nähe, gegenseitiger Unterstützung und Geborgenheit� Hier war der Ort für Bettines weibliche Selbst-und Gruppenerfahrung� Die solidarische, teilweise belehrende Haltung der Schwestern half über die Peinlichkeiten und Ärgernisse gegenüber Bettines exzentrischem, gegen die Konvention verstoßendes Verhalten hinweg� Die Geschwisterbeziehungen Bettines erhellen wichtige Aspekte des weiblichen Alltags um 1800, sie erhellen auch die wenig bekannten sozialen Netzwerke von Frauen� Notes 1 S� die Sammelbände zu der verzweigten Familie “Die Brentanos” herausgegeben von Robert Minder (1972), Konrad Feilchenfeldt und Luciano Zagari (1992), Klaus Günzel (1993) und Bernd Heidenreich (2000). 2 Bettine an Arnim aus Frankfurt, 30�/ 31� 1� 1805; Arnim 4, 55� Der geistig behinderte, sehr gutmütige Peter wurde liebevoll in der Familie versorgt; an seiner Stelle übernahm der nächstfolgende Sohn die Leitung von Familie und Handelshaus� Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister 23 3 Wieland gefiel sich 1799 bei dem Besuch von Sophie von La Roche mit ihrer Enkelin Sophie Brentanto im Zentrum eines erotischen Spiels zu stehen, - wie ehemals in der Werbung um die Sophie La Roche, damals Gutermann, wie um 1765 dann in der durchaus ernst gemeinten Werbung um die damals achtjährige Maximiliane von La Roche, der Mutter von Sophie. Wieland sah auch nicht die seelische Verwirrung, die er bei der mit Familienproblemen, Liebeskummer und Heiratssorgen belasteten Sophie anrichtete: “Meine kindliche Gefühle für Sie, sind mir über den Kopf gewachsen, ich bin darinn versunken und verloren,” schrieb Sophie Brentano nach dem ersten Aufenthalt bei Wieland. Ein Jahr später bei ihrem erneuten Besuch in Oßmannstedt verstarb sie an einem plötzlichen ,Nervenfieber‘. Wieland erbaute sich an seiner väterlichen Dichter-Aura und erotischen Ausstrahlung auf die früh verwaiste Sophie und ihre pubertäre Empfänglichkeit; er verglich die naive Sophie mit seiner Schöpfung, der Hetäre Lais im Aristip. Sophie bezahlte diese sexualisierte ,Seelenfreundschaft’ mit dem Leben - die Umstände ihrer plötzlichen ,Nervenkrankheit’ und Tod liegen im Dunkeln, was die Brentano-Familie - besonders Bettina und Clemens, der mit Gunda nach Weimar eilte, erschütterte und verärgerte; vgl. Becker-Cantarino 71. S. auch die Einleitung von Karen Schenk zu Schweinsberg zu dem Briefwechsel Sophies mit ihrer gleichaltrigen Wiener Freundin Henriette von Arnstein. 4 Hofrat Christian von Möhn wurde 1789 entlassen und stand dann unter Vormundschaft; erst nach der hohen Verschuldung von Hofrat Möhn konnte die Ehe geschieden werden. Moderne biografische Untersuchungen relativieren jedoch das Urteil von Clemens über Tante Möhn und die Sicht der Literaturgeschichte, s� Caspary� 5 Es ist nicht eindeutig zu ermitteln, wann sich Clemens erstmals Bettine näherte, ob 1798 in Offenbach, schon 1797 oder erst 1799 in Frankfurt (Schultz, Frankfurter Brentanos 247; Schultz, Unsre Lieb 9). 6 Clemens Briefe aus dieser Zeit allein füllen drei Bände der Frankfurter Brentano Ausgabe (Bd. 29, 31 und Bd. 38,1) und belegen seine Leidenschaften. 7 Clemens hatte kurz nach dem Tod seiner ersten Frau Sophie Mereau die erst 15jährige Auguste Bußmann geheiratet - ein Skandal, da er die die Minderjährige, dazu Mündel der befreundeten, prominenten Frankfurter Familie Bethmann entführt hatte und dann zur Heirat überredet werden musste� Eine informative, nicht einseitig aus der Perspektive von Clemens und der Literaturgeschichte dargestellte Lebensbeschreibung dieser wahrscheinlich auch psychologisch gestörten Frau findet sich jetzt bei Enzensberger. 8 Georg war Bettines ältester Bruder aus ihrer Herkunftsfamilie; Sophie (1806-1856) war Georgs zweite Tochter, die seit 1831 mit dem Frankfurter Senator Karls Franz von Schweitzer verheiratet war� Bruder Christian hatte 24 Barbara Becker-Cantarino an Bettine geschrieben: “Die gute Sophie […] meint die ganze Familie sollte sich vereinen u� Dich beschwören von dem Gedanken abzusehen, seine [Clemens] Korrespondenz mit Dir herauszugeben” (Arnim 4, 997). 9 Der Originalbriefwechsel Bettines mit Clemens sowie ihr eigenhändiges Manuskript zum Frühlingskranz hatte sich in Bettines Nachlass erhalten, ist aber seit der Versteigerung des gesamten Nachlasses 1929 verschollen� Im Frühlingskranz verarbeitete Bettine selektiv u� a� auch Briefe Achim von Arnims und von Sophie Mereau� 10 Tony war Bettines Schwägerin Antonia von Birckenstock (1780-1869), die seit 1798 mit Franz verheiratet war� Ob Meline die einzige aus der Frankfurter Familie war, die Bettine zu Arnims Tod kondolierte, wie Püschel (168) annimmt, ist zu bezweifeln, da die reine Familienkorrespondenz nicht lückenlos aufgehoben wurde� Works Cited Arnim, Achim von und Bettina von Arnim� Achim und Bettina in ihren Briefen. Briefwechsel Achim von Arnim und Bettina Brentano. Hg. von Werner Vordtriede. 2 Bände� Frankfurt a�M�: Insel, 1996� Arnim, Bettine von� Werke und Briefe in vier Bänden . Hg. von Walter Schmitz und Sibylle von Steinsdorff. Frankfurt a. M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1986-2004. Bd. 1: Clemens Brentano’s Frühlingskranz / Die Günderrode (1986). Bd. 2: Goethe’s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde (1992); Bd. 3 : Politische Schriften (1995); Bd. 4: Briefe (2004). Arnim, Bettine von� Werke � Hg� von Heinz Härtl� Bd� 1: Goethe‘s Briefwechsel mit einem Kinde . Berlin / Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1986. Becker-Cantarino, Barbara� Meine Liebe zu Büchern. Sophie von La Roche als professionelle Schriftstellerin . Heidelberg: Winter, 2008. Brentano, Lujo� “Der jugendliche und der gealterte Clemens Brentano über Bettine und Goethe�” Jahrbuch des Freien Deutschen Hochstifts (1929), 325-52. Caspary, E� “Christian Joseph Möhn und seine Ehe mit Luise von La Roche�” Genealogisches Jahrbuch 19 (1979), 527-90. Dölemeyer, Barbara. “Gunda Brentano (1780-1863) und Carl Friedrich von Savigny (1779-1861). Romantik und Recht.” Geist und Macht. Eine europäische Familie � Hg� Bernd Heidenreich. Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000. 159-79. Drude, Otto, Herausgeber� Christoph Martin Wieland. Sophie Brentano. Briefe und Begegnungen . Weinheim: Acta Humaniora, 1989. Enzensberger, Hans Magnus� Requiem für eine romantische Frau. Die Geschichte von Auguste Bußmann und Clemens Brentano � Berlin: Friedernauer Presse, 1988� Feilchenfeldt, Konrad und Luciano Zagari, Herausgeber� Die Brentano. Eine europäische Familie . Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992. (Reihe der Villa Vigoni, 6). Günzel, Klaus, Herausgeber� Die Brentanos. Eine deutsche Familiengeschichte � Zürich: Artemis, 1993� Selbstständigkeit, Empathie und Loyalität: Bettine Brentano-von Arnim und ihre Geschwister 25 Härtl, Heinz� “Drei Briefe von Beethoven�” Genese und Frührezeption einer Briefkomposition Bettina von Arnims � Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2016� Habermas, Rebekka� Frauen und Männer des Bürgertums. Eine Familiengeschichte (1750-1850). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 2000� Heidenreich, Bernd, Herausgeber� Geist und Macht. Die Brentanos . Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000� Labouvie, Eva, Herausgeber� Schwestern und Freundinnen. Zur Kulturgeschichte weiblicher Kommunikation . Weimar: Böhlau, 2009. Landfester, Ulrike� Faselei Online� Vorüberlegungen zu einer Internet-Publikation von Bettine von Arnims Werk. Für Sibylle von Steinsdorff zum 2. April 2000. <http: / / computerphilologie�uni-muenchen�de/ jg00landfest/ landfest�html>� 1 December 2016� Minder, Robert . Geist und Macht oder Einiges über die Familie Brentano � Mainz: Franz Steiner, 1972� Püschel, Ursula. “‘Gewaltiges hat sich ereignet.’ Zu einem Brief Bettina von Arnims an ihre Schwester Meline vom 11� Februar 1831 .” “…wider die Philister und die bleierne Zeit.” Untersuchungen, Essays, Aufsätze über Bettina von Arnim � Hg� Püschel� Berlin: Bücherstube, 1996. 163-86. Sabean, David W., Simon Teuscher, und Jon Mathieu, Herausgeber. Kinship in Europe: Approaches to Long-term Development (1300-1900) � Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007� Schellberg, Wilhelm und Wilhelm Fuchs, Herausgeber . Das unsterbliche Leben. Unbekannte Briefe von Clemens Brentano � Jena: Diederichs, 1939� Schenk zu Schweinsberg, Karen, Herausgeber� Meine Seele ist bei Euch geblieben. Briefe Sophie Brentanos an Henriette von Arnstein . Weinheim: Beltz, 1985. Schultz, Hartwig. “‘Zum Kaufmann taugst du nichts ….’ Die Frankfurter Brentano-Familie und ihre Auseinandersetzungen mit Clemens�” Frankfurt aber ist der Nabel dieser Erden. Das Schicksal einer —Generation der Goethezeit � Hg� Christoph Jamme und Otto Pöggeler. Frankfurt: Klett-Cotta, 1983. 243-57. —� “Unsre Lieb aber ist außerkohren�” Die Geschichte der Geschwister Clemens und Bettine Brentano � Frankfurt a� M� / Leipzig: Insel, 2004� —� Schwarzer Schmetterling. Zwanzig Kapitel aus dem Leben des romantischen Dichters Clemens Brentano � Berlin: Berlin Verlag 2000� —� Die Frankfurter Brentanos � Frankfurt: Insel, 2001� Steinsdorff, Sibylle von. “‘durch Convenienz sehr eingeschraubt.’ Versuch über Meline Brentano�” Die Brentano. Hg� Konrad Feilchenfeldt und Luciano Zagari� Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992. Reihe der Villa Vigoni, 6. 183-207. Trepp, Ann-Charlott . Sanfte Männlichkeit und selbständige Weiblichkeit. Frauen und Männer im Hamburger Bürgertum zwischen 1770 und 1840 � Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Rupprecht, 1996� “Liebe, böse, Line! ”: Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion in the Letters of Karoline von Günderrode and her Sisters Jordan Lavers University of Western Australia Abstract: Karoline von Günderrode and her younger sisters were a part of an extensive network of patrician families in Frankfurt� In 1797, Karoline moved from their family home in Hanau to Frankfurt and, following her departure, the sisters began writing letters to continue their sisterly relationship� The letters by the well-known German poet Karoline von Günderrode and her four younger sisters Wilhelmine, Charlotte and Amalie, have been heretofore neglected in academic scholarship� This essay adopts the letters as a case study to demonstrate how aristocratic sisters configured sorority on the page through emotional, textual, and material practices of letter writing. In the first section, this essay introduces and defines the term sorority as a concept to map kinship from the perspective of sisters� In the subsequent sections, this essay elucidates how the exigencies of sisterhood, including the material and emotional limitations during separation, reinforce the need for maintenance work over time with both loving contributions and responses of anger and admonishment� Key Words: Günderrode, gender history, emotions history, sisters, letters Karoline von Günderrode (1780-1806) and her younger sisters wrote contrasting letters to one another after she moved away from their family home in Hanau to Frankfurt in 1797� The Günderrode sisters wrote poetic and playful letters as much as they wrote pragmatic letters that were ostensibly shopping lists� They wrote letters that were dutiful expressions of love or expressions of anger and disappointment to each other, and sometimes, they expressed love and anger in the same letter, complicating the notion of the dutiful loving sister� The variety of the contents of their letters corresponds to the different material forms that the sisters adopted� The sisters habitually used the same pieces of paper for their 28 Jordan Lavers ’communal’ letters. Occasionally they composed letters individually and when it was necessary they wrote on behalf of one another or by dictation� The sisters thus configured siblingship on the page as a cluster or individually by adopting a plurality of textual and material epistolary practices� I will argue in this article that the Günderrode sisters maintained their sister-group through the repeated exchange of letters� The women visualised their sister-group on the page and co-ordinated the exchange task of their correspondence by adapting epistolary practices to meet ever-changing circumstances. The constant flow of letters between and among the sisters was maintained and inflected by the gendered expression of emotion to configure the sister-group. Through their expressions of Liebe and Bosheit to one another, the Günderrode sisters negotiated their gender identity and the sister-group itself� The success of their repeated exchange had practical consequences for the sister-network within their kin group in relation to matters of inheritance, finance and marriage. Karoline von Günderrode was the eldest of the six children; there were five girls and one boy, who was also the youngest� Following the death of her husband in 1786, the widow Louise von Günderrode moved with her six children from Karlsruhe to Hanau so that she could live closer to her maternal kin� In 1794 the second-eldest daughter, Louise, was the first sibling to die as she succumbed to tuberculosis� Charlotte died in 1801 and Amalie in 1802� Karoline committed suicide in 1806. Wilhelmine, who was the only sister to have married, died in 1819 and Hector died in 1862 (Gruber 128). This paper focuses on letters written by Wilhelmine, Charlotte and Amalie to Karoline between the years 1797 and 1801� In early 1797 Karoline moved from Hanau to the Cronstetten-Hynspergisches Damenstift for widowed and unmarried aristocratic women of the patrician families of Alten-Limpurg in Frankfurt (Lerner 95-109). Between Karoline’s admittance to the convent in 1797 and the deaths of Charlotte and Amalie in 1801 and 1802 the correspondence between the sisters maintained a sorority across the two households of young aristocratic singlewomen� On November 21, 1801, Karoline von Günderrode sent a letter to her mother’s Vermögensverwalter , Herr von Hohim, on behalf of her sisters� Their mother, Louise, worked closely with Herr von Hohim on matters of her daughters’ inheritance. Karoline’s letter reinforced the boundary of the sister-group to the exclusion of von Hohim from the affairs of the sisters. Louise and von Hohim were concerned that a close friend of the sisters, Sofie Blum, during her stay in their household in Hanau, was advising them against their own mother on their inheritance: “Sofie hat uns nie von unserer Mutter zu entfernen gesucht, sondern, welches wir nur allein wissen können, bei uns immer mit Liebe und Achtung von ihr gesprochen” ( FDH -Hs: 8326). (The transcriptions of the manuscript letters are my own� I have retained the original spelling, grammar and Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 29 underlining�) At the age of twenty-one, Karoline began a claim for her inheritance against the wishes of her mother. Karoline had intercepted von Hohim’s initial letter to her mother, in which he explicitly queried Sofie’s influence on the relationship between Louise von Günderrode and her daughters� Von Hohim targeted Sofie Blum’s character due to a suspected marital dispute with her new husband, Karl von Daub: Was Sie von Sofiens Gesinnungen gegen ihren Mann sagen, über gehe ich mit Stillschweigen� Der Gegenstand scheint mir so delikat, so ganz außer der Sphäre eines Dritter, daß er nie zur Unterhaltung eines Fremdes dienen kann. - Was Sie von Sofiens geheimen maschinerien sagen, erwidere ich mit gar nichts! ( FDH -Hs: 8326) This letter demonstrates the precedence of the eldest sister in the sisters’ correspondence and the authority of the sister-group to maintain and construct the boundaries of their group� The Günderrode sisters utilize the ethos of the precedent eldest sister and employ reticence to achieve the desired exclusion of von Hohim� As the eldest sister, Karoline took the initiative to stop von Hohim from influencing the all-female household by forcefully maintaining silence and withholding information on the circumstances surrounding Sofie Blum. Furthermore, Karoline rejected any claim he had to influence in whom the sisters confided: “Meine Schwestern und ich kennen Sofie so genau, daß uns über das Vertrauen zu ihr, kein fremder Maßstaab dienen kann” ( FDH -Hs: 8326)� The sisters exchanged letters frequently and adopted a plurality of textual and material styles creatively and strategically to maintain their sister-group� “Guten Tag! gute, alte Line! das war ich - Mine” ( FDH -Hs: 8294)� This address to Karoline by Wilhelmine emphasizes creativity in epistolary practices for the hierarchal configuration of the sisters. The informal greeting was permissible as Wilhelmine was the second eldest, but the eldest sister in the household in Hanau� The significance of the address is derived not only from her jocular address to her “gute, alte Line,” but its position in the manuscript letter itself� The greeting is a Nachschrift in a letter that was predominantly penned by their youngest sister Amalie. Wilhelmine appeared only at the end to make a request on behalf of the second youngest sister, Charlotte: “Lotte lässt dich bitten ihr ein halbes Stük graues Papier bei Nothnagel zu kaufen” ( FDH -Hs: 8294)� All three sisters appeared on the page together and this was a common pattern� It was a shared and group-orientated correspondence� The sisters wrote on the same paper together and the paper itself was bought by Karoline in Frankfurt and sent back to Hanau� A gender-based reading of epistolary practices is integral to understanding how the Günderrode sisters adopted certain epistolary provisions and practices to develop and maintain their sister-group within a broader network of familial 30 Jordan Lavers relationships. The sisters configured sorority on the page through emotional, textual and material practices of letter writing� The exigencies of sisterhood, as the material and emotional limitations during separation, reinforce the need for maintenance work over-time with both loving communications and responses of anger and admonishment� The material and textual conventions of letter writing in early modern Europe were diverse and shaped by the specificities of the relationship between the sender and receiver, as well as the contingencies of local conditions, in creative and improvised ways (Daybell 12). Daybell describes this interaction between the sender and receiver as the multi-agent nature of letter writing (13). The privacy and intimacy of a letter was defined by reading practices from within the family as a group (Daybell, “Social Negotations” 8). The sisters’ correspondence was multi-agent because they exchanged and composed letters with each other, appearing on the page together, or wrote for one another as sister-scribes� The multi-agency of the letter is extended here to incorporate the materiality of the letters in their construction and dissemination. Frank Trentmann defines a material analysis as a question of “how things, hands and senses come together [and point] to a more open, fluid view of action” (Trentmann 290). Karoline did not write the letter to von Hohim in her own hand� The letter was written entirely by her youngest sister, Amalie, as the scribe� A material reading of this letter reveals the group orientation and multiagent composition of the text by identifying and comparing the handwriting and signatures of the sisters’ letters. Karoline’s letters were sometimes written through dictation by her younger sisters as scribes when she was visiting them� The sister-scribes were just one part of a gendered epistolary practice in which the sisters configured their sorority on the page. I define here a concept of sorority to analyze the group-oriented correspondence of the Günderrode sisters. I have chosen the word ‘sorority’ over ‘sisterhood’ in order to distance the concept from connotations of the political dimensions of sisterhood in the twentieth century as well as egalitarian principles associated with fraternity� Sorority is a subset of siblingship, concentrating on sister-exclusive connections of an epistolary network of letters� The correspondence between the Günderrode sisters provides a case study that highlights the female-exclusive practices of siblingship because their youngest brother, Hector, was intentionally left out of their group-oriented correspondence� He had no influence over the maintenance of their sorority as he did not contribute to the production of their correspondence. Hector’s signature never appeared alongside those of his sisters� The concept of sorority addresses a gap in the historiography of siblingship in early modern Europe that has neglected sister-sister relationships and the formation of sister hierarchies beyond brother-sister dyads and hierarchies based on marital status� Sorority is a theoretical tool to map Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 31 kinship from the perspective of sister-groups� It challenges the assumption that by the end of the eighteenth century siblingship and sister relationships were structured by egalitarian principles and inherently sentimental with limited practical function beyond the privacy of the family home� In such arguments the work of the sisters was supposedly always on the behalf of the brother, who was the idealizer of their love (Sabean 22). Sorority draws attention to the contingencies of epistolary practices of sibling hierarchy and emotional expression in specific socio-historical contexts. It also historicizes the convergence of gender, age and marital status in siblingship (Hohkamp 69-70). Through an analysis of the letters by the Günderrode sisters, I demonstrate how the sisters maintained their sorority through the exchange of emotions� In their correspondence the younger sisters not only showed deference to Karoline, but also toward each other along the line of sisters� Both Charlotte and Amalie regularly addressed their letters to Karoline as “Liebe Beste Line�” Karoline did not address Charlotte with “Beste,” only “Liebe Lotte�” “Beste” was used by the younger sisters as an initial address of respect for their eldest sister� The absence of “Beste” from their address of Karoline coincided with letter’s that were critical of Karoline’s behavior, which will be discussed later. Precedence is defined by Sophie Ruppel as the primacy of the eldest sibling in legal and social authority of the sibling group as well as formal representation across the events and situations of the siblings� Ruppel, however, acknowledges that more research and analysis is necessary in order to understand how precedence was practiced among a line of sisters (Ruppel 131). The practice of sorority among the Günderrode sisters maintained a hierarchy based on age and marital status� Between 1797 and 1801, when the letters discussed in this paper were written, Karoline, Wilhelmine, Charlotte and Amalie were unmarried and as historical subjects they are classified here as life-cycle singlewomen, that is, women who were expected to eventually marry (Bennett 2). Precedence and deference in the sorority is furthermore defined by the negotiation and maintenance of a relationship rather than strict obedience and subordination (Ruppel 101-02). The younger sisters maintained practices of deference and precedence to their eldest sister through their emotional expressions in their letters and continued to reinforce her ranked position, regardless of whether Karoline wanted to fulfill this role or not� On April 28, 1797, Charlotte and Amalie wrote a second letter together to Karoline, as she had not responded to their previous one. Charlotte wrote first and was followed by Amalie in the same bifolium� In the language of their letter the two younger sisters demonstrated the necessity to earn a response from Karoline in order to reaffirm their sister relationship following Karoline’s new residence in the Damenstift � In the line of sisters, Charlotte held precedence 32 Jordan Lavers over Amalie in their letter of deference to Karoline� The ranking of sisters was textually and materially visualized on the page� As the eldest in the household and the closest in age to Karoline, it was not necessary for Wilhelmine to demonstrate deference in the same form� As Charlotte wrote in her conclusion to her contribution in the letter: “Ob gleich du mir nicht antwortest so macht es mir Vergnugen an dich zu schreiben in der Hoffnung dich zu vorzeigen daß ich meine Vergehe bereue” (Senckenberg 9-10). Amalie introduced her contribution by strikingly emphasizing her physical difficulties and anxiety in writing a dutiful letter� She had received no response from her initial letter� By beginning her second letter with self-deprecation, because writing a good letter worthy of a response was not easy for her, Amalie could then earn a response from her eldest sister� Schon zum zweitenmale strenge ich mein Gehirn an, um vielleicht bloß eine Antwort zu verdienen, denn diesesmal verdiene ich wirklich eine Antwort, so wenig auch auf die Beine gebracht werden kann, denn aus einer Laterne etwas geniesbares ziehen ist wie du weist sehr schwer. (Senckenberg 9-10) Although Charlotte took precedence in her letter, it was necessary for both sisters to write and show due deference to their eldest sister to earn a response from her. This first letter is unique in comparison to the subsequent letters discussed in this article because it was one of the only letters in which Charlotte and Amalie shared the page. This letter is significant because it demonstrates how the sisters creatively and strategically adapted epistolary practices over time� As expressed in the quotation above, Charlotte and Amalie brought themselves pleasure by writing letters of deference to their eldest sister� To love their eldest sister was to demonstrate duty and deference to her in order to receive a response� Twelve year-old Amalie compared her production of a pleasurable letter for Karoline’s consumption to pulling out a treat from a lantern, possibly as a reference to St. Martin’s Day, when children walk in procession carrying lanterns, singing songs, and receive candy: “Wenn aus einer Laterne etwas geniesbares ziehen ist wie du weist sehr schwer.” The positive affirmation of their correspondence, through pleasure and sisterly love, signifies the importance of emotion in sustaining precedence and deference in the sorority: pleasing and positive continuous exchanges of letters to an eldest sister� Sisterly love was constituted by the form and the exchange of letters� Sincerity and intimacy of feeling were informed by the material and textual epistolary manifestations of feeling and temporal frequency of the exchange of letters by the sisters� The expressions of emotions by sisters to one another through the exchange of letters was inflected by gendered behavior. However, emotions in the letters cannot be attributed to a female specificity. The emotions themselves Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 33 do not have a gender� The patterns and practices of emotional expression were gendered practices, thereby constructing historical lived-experience of gender through emotional expression. I adopt Benno Gammerl’s concept of emotional styles to analyze the expression of gendered emotions, because emotional styles are not restricted to “identity-based concepts of personhood or culture nor to rules and models nor to the aesthetic dimensions of expression” (163). As Gammerl defines his concept, “emotional styles encompass, instead, the experience, fostering, and display of emotions, and oscillate between discursive patterns and embodied practices as well as between common scripts and specific appropriations” (163). I adopt the term “emotional styles” to analyse expressions of emotions instead of representation of emotion in order to avoid a standardization of feminine emotionality in the exchange of letters by sisters� Attempting to locate specific feminine emotionality in representations of women’s emotions in historical texts leads to cultural relativism that constructs difference at the expense of historical lived experience and to speculate on what practices drove those differences. An approach of merely representing difference fails to acknowledge the historical categories of gendered bodies. Characterizing gender difference in emotional expression to a particular “women’s culture,” as anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod has argued, does not escape the tendency towards essentialism (147). By framing a historical analysis of gendered emotions around the question of representation of difference, such analyses paradoxically re-instate an “essentialised view of gender as difference,” and freeze difference within those categories, constructing coherence and homogeneity (Shields 428). The concept of gendered practices of emotional expression furthers a similar theoretical trajectory as Susan Broomhall’s and Jacqueline Van Gent’s notion of “rendered expressions of emotional selves” (147). Linda Pollock also defines emotions as “socially constituted syndromes” (571). I adopt the concept of emotional styles to analyze how the expression of emotions in correspondence maintained practices of precedence and deference in the sorority over time� Emotions “[emerge] from bodily dispositions conditioned by a social context, which always has cultural and historical specificity” (Scheer 193). The gendering practices of emotional expressions in letter writing by the Günderrodes were part of a process of on-going maintenance work of the sorority as an exchange task� The correspondence of the Günderrode sisters was an exchange task that was adapted over time to consider ever changing circumstances across their life course� Their familial feeling of sisterliness was constituted by a number of practices. As William M. Reddy describes it, “stable patterns of such statements, repeated over years, have very profound, shaping effects on one’s whole emotional makeup” (331). The exchange of letters was a part of what Reddy describes as “the deployment of attentional resources” (23). The letter was not 34 Jordan Lavers just a physical manifestation of sister-sister relationships that they held in their hands, but letters were also agents in the production and continuous reproduction of sisterly affections over distance and time. The material production of letter writing was highly-activated thought material that shaped and maintained siblingship at each stage of its production, dissemination and consumption� Thoughts and attention about any given situation or relationship are conceptualized not as pre-existing an expression, but as occupying an intermediate state, “somewhere between fully attended and fully ignored” (Reddy 20). Reddy argues further: “the indeterminacy of action situations demands a selective sensitivity, a flexible deployment of attentiveness” (20). Attention and activation of kinship and emotional expression in letter writing were embodied by a blank piece of paper: the form of the letter was not immediately fixed to an innate pre-existing relationship, rather, it was open to a number of possible configurations of epistolarity to form the boundaries of the sorority� Through its provisions, the tools and bodies needed, the composition of a letter calls to attention the specific familial dispositions and the reproduction of kinship constituted by gendered emotions� The meaning and value of the object was contingent to its usage� The expressions of emotion in letters by the sisters were emotives explicitly directed towards the exchange process of letters� Reddy writes that “Emotives are themselves instruments for directly changing, building, hiding, intensifying emotions, instruments that may be more or less successful. Within the disaggregated self, emotives are a dynamic tool that can be seized by attention in the service of various high-level goals” (104-05). Social materiality as embodied materiality questions the agency and causation of social relationships when material objects are embedded in the fabric of kinship practices� The sisters used quills and ink on paper to co-ordinate their emotional practices into habits over time and they transformed reciprocity into reproductivity through their exchange of letters� Through the expressions of Liebe and Bosheit , the composition and exchange of letters could be either productive or disruptive and pleasant or unpleasant to the sorority� As an exchange unfolding over time, the letters elucidate rhetorical patterns of emotional expressions that were habituated in order to constitute sisterly affections of the sorority. Karoline wrote to Charlotte in August, 1800: Wenn du mich ein geringsten liebst, so halte dein Versprechen u komm, bist du’s allein so kan ich dich 1 bis 2 Nächte bei mir einquartieren, vor essen u trinken u dein liebliches Wohlergehen lasse mich nur sorgen. Ich bitte dich kome, sonst werde ich dir böse u melankolisch. ( FDH -Hs: 8323) Karoline singled out Charlotte to attend to her in Frankfurt� Charlotte could only visit Karoline after receiving the invitation� Intimacy and love between the Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 35 sisters were informed by precedence and deference in the sorority. Charlotte’s enunciation of “bloße Empfindung” in her letters was not merely an appropriation of style from a cult of sensibility� Sincerity and legitimacy of sisterly love were maintained through the temporal frequency of the exchange� The material intimacies of visitation, attendance and eating, correspond to the epistolary exchange between Karoline and Charlotte that was differentiated from the open and shared correspondence by Amalie and Wilhelmine. Charlotte wrote separately from Amalie on paper physically split from an original bifolium� In the undated letter from the first months of 1800 quoted below, the paper was folded in the standard bifolium form but the original sheet had been cropped in half� One piece was given to Charlotte and the other to Amalie. We know the paper was cut in half as each letter by Charlotte and Amalie were half the size of a traditional bifolium leaf� The only letter that is the full bifolium leaf was written by Karoline’s mother, Wilhelmine and Amalie ( FDH -Hs: 8282)� The intimacy of Charlotte’s sisterly relationship with Karoline was distinguished from Amalie both in the physical separation of the full page and her use of spacing and sealing in order to maintain epistolary secrecy when she wrote and then finally dispatched it� Charlotte folded her letter with the traditional tuck-and-seal method, in which the bifolium was folded twice horizontally, twice vertically, and then the left portion is tucked into the right side before sealing (Steen 65)� In the opening paragraph quoted below, Charlotte displayed her love and devotion for her eldest sister textually and materially to reinforce confidence in Karoline’s position. The change in composition and style to individual missives between Karoline and Charlotte was due to the likelihood that Charlotte would join Karoline in the convent in Frankfurt. Intimacy and closer affection between beloved sisters was not an innate love but strategic and fostered over time through their correspondence� Meine Beste! Ich hatte mir fest vorgenommen dir nur was scherzhaftes zu schreiben; aber dein leztes Brief hat mir so gerührt; hat alle Quellen meines Liebe gegen dich aufgethan, daß es mir nicht möglich wäre dir so etwas Gewöhnliches zu schreiben� Ja Liebe! Er hat mir so innige Freude gemacht, daß ich weinen könnte� “Gewiß Beste, ich liebe dich recht innig, und war wollen recht innig, recht vergnügt� Auch selbst du dich nicht mehr klagen können, daß ich kein Zutrauen zu dir hätte; und was war auch ein Mangel daran wenn ich dir manches nicht sagte, denn du weist ia bloße Empfindungen sind so schwer zu sagen, und man muß auch fürchte daß man mißverstanden wird; und öfters ist man sie sich selbst nicht deutlich bewußt� Aber ich weiß es, ich kann die alles denn du bist schonend und liebreich gegen mich� Ia noch freue mich darauf, denn es ist der schönste Augenblik, wenn man jemand Geliebtes sein ganzes Herz zeigen kann. (Senckenberg 15-18) 36 Jordan Lavers Charlotte’s deference to Karoline was distinguished from that of Wilhelmine and Amalie, as she sought to convey simple and sincere feelings (Lutz 296). The enunciation of “ich liebe dich recht innig” was directed to the exchange of letters as Charlotte re-affirmed her trust and confidence in Karoline. Recognition of sincerity in their correspondence was dependent on the temporality and the regularity of the epistolary exchange� Sincere emotions were therefore influenced by the patterns of regularity of composition and dissemination of the exchange process in relation to the letters written before and thereafter� Charlotte recognized how difficult such sincere constructions were to compose textually: “Verzeihe daß ich so häßlich schreibe, ich habe aber meine Hände noch gar nicht in meiner Gewalt”(FDH-Hs: 8286)� Charlote ended her letter with a Nachschrift of deference: “Habe Gedult mit meinem Gekritzel; aber es war mir nothwendig dir zu schreiben”(Senckenberg 5-6). She apologized for the quality of her writing as scribbles and scrawls� She emphasized the importance of careful composition and sought Karoline’s patience for such an improper form. The expression of love between sisters in letters was not a perfect exchange of deference, but they could be imperfect in form, style and temporality� In the following undated letter by Karoline to Charlotte, Karoline reassured her younger sister that her failures in writing did not impede their closeness, their harmony in spirit� Liebe Lotte, dich werde ich nicht sehen wenn die andern hierher kommen das weis ich wohl, und bescheide mich auch daß es so sein muß; aber kaum kann ich es erwarten dich zu sehen� Tausenderlei habe ich dir zu sagen was nur Lotte wissen soll� Gewis liebst du mich nicht wie ich dich liebe; dein Bild steht rein von meiner Seele und deine Fehler welche mich wenn ich dir näher bin oft zu Ungeduld und Heftigkeit reitzen scheinen ein so klein und unbedenkens als Atome� Alles was ich weis und gelernt habe möchte ich gerne dir mittheilen; trost Liebe und Harmonie in deiner Seel suchen� Ich bitte dich Lotte bin ich wieder nun dich so lerne meine Fehler liebend ertragen, laß es dich nicht verdrießen wenn ich dir die deinige sage, denn du weist daß ich gegen nichts unduldsamer bin als gegen die Fehler geliebter Personen; ich bitte dich thun alles mögliche damit unsere schöne Harmonie nie gestört werde� Deine Karoline� ( FDH -Hs: 8325) Although Karoline could not see Charlotte as she was hosting other guests in her apartment in the Damenstift , she assured her sister that she wanted to see and confide in her, what she would only share with Charlotte. Any failures or misdemeanors in their correspondence would only appear to be as small as atoms, once Karoline was physically close to Charlotte� Karoline forgave Charlotte’s failures in writing; however, she affirmed that Charlotte should strive to do all that is possible to evade any disruption to their letters of synchronicity Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 37 and harmony� Physical intimacy in presence was preferred, but, in the face of absence, regularity and reciprocity of the correspondence was absolutely necessary� No matter how inconceivable failures in writing might have been, these failures put into question the extent to which harmony in the sorority could be sustained with consistent absence if frequent failures could indeed perturb such harmony� Hands construct, exchange and hold letters as embodied materializations of relationships� Those same hands could be troubled or, as it will be subsequently demonstrated, reluctant to exchange the letters on time� The sorority had to be maintained because it was imperfect, separated and disrupted by distance, and it was not a continuous cyclical exchange of idealized sisterly affections. The correspondence did not always go according to plan. Karoline’s correspondence to her sisters was marked by her tardiness. She was reluctant to respond to her sisters on time and as regularly as they wanted it to be. Although Charlotte was sympathetic to the evils of Karoline’s delay, such inactivity stressed the limitations of the sorority, and these subsequent letters by the younger sisters questioned the authority of Karoline and the value of her love for her them: Ich war recht vergnügt als ich deinen Brief erhielt, denn ich wuste gar nicht was ich denken sollte? weil du mir solange nicht geschrieben hättest. ob du krank warest, ob du mich ganz vergeßen hättest? und wirst du mir verzeihen? Daß ich so egoistisch war lieber das erstern zu wünschen? ia! daß ich sogar ganz beruhigt war, als ich erfahren hatte daß es die Schuld sei, aber demungeachtet habe ich doch herzliches Mitleid mit dir, und wünsche recht sehr daß du deines Übels überhoben wärest. ( FDH -Hs: 8286) Wilhelmine’s and Amalie’s expressions of anger maintained Karoline’s precedence in the sorority� Their anger towards Karoline was expressed directly at her lack of commitment to the exchange of letters� Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argued that in the female world of love and ritual of the eighteenth century, hostility and criticism towards other women was discouraged (14). Smith-Rosenberg assumed that anger and hostility were harmful to the network of women and discouraged close and affectionate ties. As presented in the letters by Wilhelmine, Charlotte and Amalie, this was not the case� Expressed in letters by younger sisters, anger was not just the privilege of familial ranking, nor solely a response to a challenge hierarchy (Broomhall and Van Gent 155). The expression of anger by Amalie maintained the sorority by strengthening the precedence of her eldest sister and it was negotiated within the rhetoric of deference� The younger sisters could defend themselves and criticize their eldest sister through their expression of anger in a letter (Pollock 576). Anger expressed by the younger sisters was therefore not illicit� It was directed towards maintaining the exchange of letters in the sorority. When the younger sisters expressed anger, 38 Jordan Lavers they had to legitimize their sentiment because of their position of rank and deference in the sorority (Kennedy 12-13). As expressed by Wilhelmine, love and anger were still a part of the same desire for closeness and regularity in the correspondence� In 1799, wedged between contributions by her mother and her youngest sister, Wilhelmine wrote, “Liebe, böse, Line! Ich bin dir fast böse, weil du so gottlos faul bist; du weist nicht wie sehr einem nach einem Brief von lieber Hand sehnt? Ich muß es beinahe glauben. Deine Mine, die dich immer herzlich liebt” ( FDH -Hs: 8282)� Wilhelmine was not entirely angry with Karoline, but her criticism was a response to Karoline’s laziness in not responding to their letters. In the same letter Amalie wrote a similiar critical response to Karoline that was, in contrast, not as playful in style as Wilhelmine‘s contribution. Amalie’s was direct in justifying her frustrations with her sister’s eight-day silence. Amalie did not write an initial address of “Liebe Line,” which was standard in their correspondence, and thereby set the tone of her angry missive� Der Weg von Frankfurt nach Hanau ist doch nicht so immer lange; auch sind Posten angelegt und Boten durchkreuzen pfleisig die Chaussee; ich sehe also nicht ein warum du gar nicht von dir hören lasst, man weis nicht ob du lebst oder nicht lebst� Lese doch, ich bitte, zum Exempel für dich Iphigenia� Sie konnte es fast nicht ertragen von ihren Eltern und Geschwistern getrent zu sein und hätte gewiß gerne eine Louis D’or für einen Brief gegeben; aber dir, u abscheulich, sind 2 Kreuzer zu viel. Wie, oder wäre als Faulheit von dir? Sie wäre auch nicht sehr rühmlich. Und nun denke dir einmal recht lebhaft wie es muß zumuthe ist. ( FDH -Hs: 8295) Amalie referred to the myth of Iphigenia, who was the eldest daughter of Agamemnon and was sacrificed to the gods so that he could sail safely to Troy. Amalie reminded Karoline of her separation in Frankfurt and that her position of authority as the eldest sister was not inherent� She had to work to maintain her precedent position with her younger sisters� The younger sisters could dismiss Karoline’s precedence and sacrifice it, which Amalie represented with the figure of Iphigenia. Amalie suggested that Karoline should reflexively and sympathetically consider how Iphigenia would have felt after she was abandoned on the island by her family. Amalie signed-off in anger and this emotion was textualized in her rhetorical play with the form of the epistolary signature� After closing with the formulaic adieu , she followed with an insult: “Adieu unwürdiges Schädigsten, mache dich bald meiner werth. Amalie” ( FDH -Hs: 8295). Amalie’s abrupt signature emphasized Karoline’s separation and she criticized Karoline’s failure to correspond with her sisters in Hanau� Amalie challenged her eldest sister’s continued appreciation of their sister relationship and the sorority itself. What value did they have for her, if she refused to correspond with them and Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 39 thus damaged the reciprocity of the exchange relationship through idleness and silence? Karoline’s authoritative position was dependent on her active and reciprocal exchanges with her sisters that were loving and regular� Amalie did not express her anger to reject Karoline completely, but to reinforce her obligation and the duty to her younger sisters through continued participation in their correspondence, lest it should fall apart and become inactive and unloving� Charlotte ended a letter to Karoline from December, 1799, with a mocking Nachschrift : “Wenn du dieses lesen kannst, so gratuliere ich dir”(Senckenberg 11-12). Charlotte’s joke was for once not aimed at Karoline’s laziness or a delay; rather it referred to the fact that Karoline’s eyesight was deteriorating. In the contents of the letter, Charlotte notified Karoline that their doctor could see her and Karoline could purchase a pair of glasses: “Eben habe ich mit dem Docter gesprochen, er kann nicht den Tag bestimmen wenn er kommen kann, um dir die Brille zu kaufen, doch wird er noch zu dir kommen ehr die noch Lengfeld gehst” (Senckenberg 11-12). That following year, Karoline wrote to Charlotte in August: “Ich habe weder Zeit noch Augen viel zu schreiben nur ein paar Worte” ( FDH -Hs: 8323). Karoline’s ability to write letters as the eldest sister was hindered by her deteriorating eyesight� Not just a subject of potential humor for the sisters, Karoline’s eyesight was partially responsible for Amalie and Wilhelmine writing letters for Karoline as sister-scribes� Karoline was the sister of precedence and the most articulate� She always spoke on behalf of her sorority� However her eyes failed her� She could not always read well and her handwriting was often large and simplified, as she was unable to write a thorough letter within the confines of a bifolium. I conclude with this reference to eyesight and the sister-scribes as it reinforces the exchange of the letters as the body, hands, eyes and emotions, coming together to maintain the sorority, as well as the limitations imposed by the failures of hands and eyes and even of sisterly love� Charlotte died in 1801 and Amalie died in 1802. Wilhelmine’s marriage in 1804 marked the end of the sorority as she left Karoline and their shared correspondence� They no longer wrote for and with each other� In a fashion similar to the sister-scribes, Karoline sought help from both Bettine Brentano and Susan von Heyden to write for her in her letters and in her journal (Morgenthaler). Along with the sisters Gunda and Bettine Brentano, Karoline had befriended Susan von Heyden and her half-sister, Lisette Nees von Essenbeck, both born as von Mettingh in Frankfurt, before Susan and Lisette were married� Lisette referred to Karoline’s secretary in a letter addressed to Karoline. In February 1806, Karoline received medicine for her eyes from the botanist Christian Gottfried Nees von Essenbeck, the husband of Lisette� He directed Karoline to apply Augenwasser to a handkerchief and then to her closed eyes for as long as it was necessary ( FDH -Hs: 8331)� He requested her to communicate the results to him and if this 40 Jordan Lavers preparation did not work, he would send her a different mixture. The production and consumption of letters in the exchange network was only as successful as the actions and gestures of the physical bodies involved, that is, how those bodies read, wrote and felt their sisterliness� As I have discussed here, the correspondence among the Günderrode sisters provides a case study for an analysis of how letters negotiated and maintained sister-sister relationships in German-speaking aristocratic families. What remains to be analyzed in letters by early modern sisters in Europe in general, is how were material and textual practices of sister-clusters strategically adopted within their familial and inter-familial networks� The extent of the role of the sister-cluster in the broader network is represented here with Charlotte’s recommendation that Karoline should write to their relatives in Frankfurt and send them a document that verified their lineage: “Du wirst also gebethen versprochenen Stammbaum sobald wie möglich schikken, um Otto der sich sehr viel Vortheil von dieser Verwandschaft versprich; aber noch sehr daran zweifelt daß sie genug sein bewiesen könnte werden, davon zu überzeugen” ( FHD -Hs: 8287). (Otto, the mediator between Karoline and her relatives, is referred to in other letters between the sisters, however his identity is unknown�) Charlotte argued further in her letter that it was not enough to just demonstrate lineage or visualize a family tree� Kinship was not active unless it was practiced, regardless of the families’ well-known position in the patrician society of Alten-Limpurg. Sorority and the group-orientated correspondence of the sister-cluster were networking strategies of the Günderrode sisters� The exchange of letters by female relations formed affective nodes of exchange networks through their correspondence, thereby activating and maintaining configurations of kinship, which could otherwise remain idle or even illegitimate (Hohkamp 94). The Günderrode sisters’ network of letters extended further to the von Leonhardi, von Mettingh, von Glauburg, as well as the Fichard, Brentano and Serviere sisters, when these women were all singlewomen and then later once they had married off into different families. Sister-sister orientated correspondence and the ways in which this correspondence influenced the configuration of siblingship in the broader exchange network of kinship alliances has been generally overlooked in historical scholarship� Through a sketch of the exchange of letters between the Günderrode sisters, this article hopes to shed light on how the clustering of sisters on the page and the maintenance of a sorority formed a group-coordinated exchange network� The material and textual manifestations of the sorority were evidently creative, emotional and strategic devices of siblingship� I have endeavored to illuminate the ties that bind German-speaking aristocratic sisters as fundamental to a broader system of kinship and aristocratic culture� The extensive Maintaining Sorority through the Expression of Emotion 41 networks between clusters of sisters will further our understanding of how women-centered correspondence shaped kinship and corresponding exchange practices among the German-speaking and European aristocracy throughout the eighteenth century� Works Cited Abu-Lughod, Lila. “Writing against Culture. 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J. “Reading Beyond the Words: Material Letters and the Process of Interpretation .” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 22 (2001): 55� Trentmann, Frank� “Materiality in the Future of History: Things, Practices, and Politics�” Journal of British Studies 48.2 (2009): 283. Universitätsbibliothek Johann Christian Senckenberg� Frankfurt am Main, Abteiling 2, A1 Briefe an Karoline von Günderrode� Obscure Conceptions: The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… Eleanor ter Horst University of South Alabama Abstract: Kleist’s “Die Marquise von O…” (1808) and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “Das Gelübde” (1817) feature similar plots involving an unexplained pregnancy, yet the two texts have had surprisingly different critical receptions: Hoffmann’s has generated relatively little critical response while Kleist’s continues to attract the attention of interpreters� Indeed, critics have generally thought “Das Gelübde” to be an inferior version of Kleist’s original concept. I argue in contrast that the Hoffmann text anticipates its reception as derivative of Kleist’s and reverses this judgment, displacing “Die Marquise von O…” as the originary text and obscuring the “conception” or origin of both texts. Ovid’s notion of the “auctor ambiguus” (ambiguous messenger / author / father), deployed by Hoffmann, allows his text to reverse the generational chronology of patriarchal succession and introduce a feminine challenge to the system. “Das Gelübde” thus reconfigures the two texts as siblings (sisters) competing on a more equal footing. Keywords: Heinrich von Kleist, E. T. A. Hoffmann, “Das Gelübde,” “Die Marquise von O…,” paternity, sisterhood, conception, succession, origin Despite significant narrative overlap, Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… (1808) and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde (1817) have had surprisingly divergent critical receptions, with Hoffmann’s tale generating relatively little response from the time of its publication to the present, 1 and Kleist’s continuing to attract the attention of readers and critics� 2 Both tales narrate a mysterious and at first apparently immaculate conception, confronting the reader with the puzzle of an unexplained pregnancy, and centering on the solution to the question of the paternity involved� In each tale, family ties and obligations are key elements in the unfolding of the narrative, with paternity forming the central riddle and 44 Eleanor ter Horst patriarchal authority forming the structure against which both female protagonists struggle� When critics have noted the parallels between Kleist’s novella and Hoffmann’s tale, they have generally received Das Gelübde as an inferior version of Kleist’s original concept, without particular value on its own. 3 I would argue that they have missed a significant feature of Hoffmann’s work: in fact, Hoffmann anticipates the reception of his tale as derivative of Kleist’s and challenges this idea, displacing Die Marquise von O… as the originary text. Kleist’s focus on uncertain paternity, and his masking of the moment when the conception of the Marquise’s child occurs, reappear in Hoffmann, not simply as elements of the plot, but as models for the way in which Hoffmann’s text relates to Kleist’s. Hoffmann challenges the status of Die Marquise von O… as the “father” text that gives rise to Das Gelübde by obscuring the “conception” or origin of both texts through temporal and spatial displacements, and through expansion of plot elements that are not fully articulated in Kleist’s text. More than a derivative of Die Marquise von O… , Das Gelübde revises Kleist’s interpretation of the female protagonist, emphasizing the challenge that she poses to patriarchal succession� The contests over ownership and the right to interpret the female body within a patriarchal system are connected, in Hoffmann’s schema, to the textual struggle for primacy between Die Marquise von O… and Das Gelübde , two male-authored texts featuring a female protagonist. Hoffmann links struggles over patriarchal and literary succession to political and territorial struggles; this link is indicated by the setting of his text as well as Kleist’s during a time of war. While the connection between the contested territory of the female body and disputed national or political boundaries is present in Kleist’s novella, Hoffmann’s adds another layer of complexity by connecting these two struggles with a battle for literary primacy� Hoffmann’s relationship to Kleist as literary predecessor suggests an “anxiety of influence” as described by Harold Bloom; yet Bloom configures the relationship with the predecessor as congruent with the father-son relationship (11). 4 Hoffmann’s struggle with Kleist does engage with Die Marquise von O… as “father” text; yet it does so from a multiplicity of familial perspectives, and the question of primacy cannot be reduced to one of patriarchal succession� In some ways, Hoffmann’s text relates to Kleist’s as a daughter to a father: the characters who rebel against the father and jeopardize the patriarchal systems of authority and inheritance in both Kleist and Hoffmann are daughters, not sons. Furthermore, the rivalry between the texts is also reminiscent of a sibling rivalry, in which Das Gelübde is configured as the first-born son or daughter, reversing the birth order of the texts. In Kleist, the Marquise’s as yet unborn son, though third in birth order, receives much more attention than his older half sisters because The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 45 of the mysterious circumstances of his conception. Hoffmann’s text positions itself much like this son: by obscuring its origins, it assumes priority over the older “sister” text by Kleist. The sister’s displacement is thematized in both texts by the sexual violence to which the female protagonists are subjected� In Hoffmann’s text, a further suppression of the sister or daughter occurs when the protagonist assumes the role of nun (“Laienschwester” [316]), concealing her sexuality, her identity and her history beneath the mask and the habit that she wears� In Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… the violation of the female protagonist’s body is linked with territorial aggression through the novella’s war-time setting. While the narrator specifies a locale in northern Italy during an unidentified conflict, most likely the War of the Second Coalition against Napoleon, the novella’s subtitle suggests a spatial displacement of the action that casts the specificity of place into question: “Nach einer wahren Begebenheit, deren Schauplatz vom Norden nach dem Süden verlegt worden” (104). 5 The opening of the novella refers to the invasion of this northern Italian territory by Russian troops, who take possession of the citadel where the Marquise’s father is serving as commander� The attempted rape of the Marquise by the soldiers, her rescue by Graf F…, her loss of consciousness, and her subsequent discovery that she is pregnant link the violation of her body with the incursion of Russian troops into the space commanded by her father� In Das Gelübde as in Die Marquise von O… ,the violation of a woman’s body occurs in tandem with political and territorial disputes. As the subtitle of Kleist’s novella suggests, the site of the action has been changed from north to south� Hoffmann’s tale reverses the displacement effected by Kleist as it situates the action in northern Europe, on the border between Poland and Prussia: Am Michaelistage, eben als bei den Karmelitern die Abendhora eingeläutet wurde, fuhr ein mit vier Postpferden bespannter stattlicher Reisewagen donnernd und rasselnd durch die Gassen des kleinen polnischen Grenzstädtchens L� und hielt endlich still vor der Haustür des alten deutschen Bürgermeisters. (285) Like Kleist, Hoffmann chooses contested territory as the setting for his novella. The border between Prussia and Poland calls to mind the territorial aggressivity of the Germans, just as Kleist’s novella’s setting in northern Italy suggests Napoleon’s territorial ambitions. Hoffmann introduces another, authorial dimension to the territorial struggle. While Kleist indicates that he has shifted the action of his tale from the north (perhaps Germany) to the south (Italy), Hoffmann sets his tale in northern Europe (Poland at the German / Prussian border), moving the action back to German territory. Hoffmann lays claim to the site that Kleist had indicated as the originary space for his text and challenges 46 Eleanor ter Horst the primacy of Kleist’s tale by suggesting that Hoffmann’s literary creation is in fact the originary text that precedes Kleist’s. Hoffmann’s claim to the literary territory occupied by Kleist finds its political analogue in the successive partitioning of Poland by Prussia, Russia and Austria, which, although it is only hinted at in the opening sentence, plays a key role in the action of the tale� 6 What is immediately apparent is that the “stattlicher Reisewagen” with its tumultuous approach represents an intrusion and a disruption of established routines� Just as in Die Marquise von O… , Russian troops invade the territory of northern Italy and the citadel occupied by the Marquise and her parents, so does the coach with its mysterious occupants transform the established order of the Polish border town in Das Gelübde , disrupting for a time the cycle of religious observances that have structured it. The temporal specification of “Michaelistage” (Michaelmas, September 29) is itself suggestive, with its evocation of the archangel Michael who battled Satan and was considered the patron saint of soldiers� The appeal to religious authority is further elaborated with the reference to the Carmelites, a Catholic religious order, whose calendar and daily schedule of prayer (“Abendhora”) mark the passage of time in the surrounding area� The intruders into this tranquil scene enact a reversal of the Prussian invasion of Poland: among the coach’s occupants is the daughter of a Polish aristocratic family, who enters the home of the German Bürgermeister accompanied by an abbess, thus bringing Catholic Poland into the (Polish) territory occupied by the Germans� In another reversal of Kleist’s tale, the invaders are not men, but rather two women: the abbess and Hermengilda (or Cölestine, as she is renamed). This young woman arrives dressed as a nun, visibly pregnant, and eventually gives birth to a son while a guest there, although the circumstances of her pregnancy remain mysterious to the German family sheltering her� The German, Polish and religious groupings, though distinguished in the novella’s opening sentences, are nonetheless interrelated� The Bürgermeister takes in Hermengilda during her pregnancy because he is requested to do so by “Fürst Z�,” who is Hermengilda’s uncle and also the benefactor (“Gönner”) of the Bürgermeister. The wife of the Bürgermeister is persuaded to accept the pregnant young woman into her house after being told about a payment (“tüchtigen Beutel mit Dukaten” [288]) sent by Fürst Z� The monk, Pater Cyprianus, who is responsible for Hermengilda’s vow to cover her face with a veil and her decision to enter the convent, is also the family’s confessor (“Beichtvater” [315]), who is summoned in place of a doctor when Hermengilda experiences a mental breakdown� A close, quasi-familial relationship between Hermengilda / Cölestine and the abbess is also suggested: the abbess takes on a maternal role towards the young woman, referring to her as “meinem armen Kinde” (286), and implying that the religious family The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 47 replaces Hermengilda’s family of origin; however, the structure of the convent, with its emphasis on seclusion and purity, functions not as a true alternative to the aristocratic or bourgeois family, but rather as a parody of its most extreme traits� The dual identity of the female protagonist as an aristocratic daughter (Hermengilda) and as a religious “sister” (Cölestine) reveals the duplicity of sexual mores, and the difficulties involved in regulating sexuality within both religious and civil contexts. The protagonist’s aristocratic Polish family of origin and the religious “family” that she later joins enforce similar restrictions, while the German bourgeois family appears to offer a more welcoming attitude to the stranger who bursts into their established routines and territory� The close social and economic relations among the three familial groups are reflected in the geographical and temporal designations used in the novella’s first sentence which, as we have seen, suggests contested, but also shifting and overlapping spaces� Similarly, Das Gelübde and Die Marquise von O… overlap thematically and structurally, even as Hoffmann differentiates his tale from Kleist’s through reversal and displacement� The first section of Das Gelübde elaborates on the situation suggested in its opening sentence: it narrates the intrusion of Hermengilda (Polish nobility) and the abbess (representative of religious authority) into the house of the town’s representative of civil authority (the German Bürgermeister). Like Kleist’s Die Marquise von O…. which suggests a displacement of the setting of the story from north to south, and thus conceals certain circumstances while purporting to reveal the truth (“nach einer wahren Begebenheit”), Das Gelübde emphasizes concealment of actions and motivations� The Bürgermeister does not inform his wife of his agreement to take in Hermengilda until after the young woman has arrived, and the visitors both conceal their identity: Hermengilda wears a thick veil that she refuses to remove, and her status is only gradually revealed over the course of the novella, as she first requests to be called “Cölestine” in accordance with her role as a nun, but is later revealed as Hermengilda, the descendant of Polish nobility� The identity of the abbess is also uncertain, until she removes her outer garment to reveal her nun’s habit and the cross that indicate her role within the religious hierarchy, as a Cistercian abbess� The Bürgermeister also emphasizes his official role, as he puts on his ceremonial clothing (“Ehrenkleid” [285]) to receive his visitors� The three characters are thus depicted initially not as individuals but as representatives of their roles within religious and civil structures� The authority of these structures is contested and, though not overturned, called into question by the events of the subsequent narration, which also challenges the preeminence of the “father” text, Die Marquise von O… � The challenge to paternal authority within the narration comes from the daughter reinvented as “sister,” Hermengilda / Cölestine� 48 Eleanor ter Horst Despite its reversal of Kleist’s setting, the narrative structure of Das Gelübde echoes that of Die Marquise von O… , both of which open with the mystery of an unexplained pregnancy, then, in extended flashbacks, work towards an explanation of its origin. Kleist’s tale begins with the Marquise’s placement of a newspaper announcement, which makes public her predicament: “Daß sie, ohne ihr Wissen, in andre Umstände gekommen sei, daß der Vater zu dem Kinde, das sie gebären würde, sich melden solle; und daß sie, aus Familienrücksichten, entschlossen wäre, ihn zu heiraten” (104). That the Marquise is prepared to marry the unknown father of her child distinguishes her from Hoffmann’s Hermengilda, a point to which I will return later. Hoffmann’s tale, however, opens similarly, with the female protagonist’s arrival in the Polish border town, the revelation that she is pregnant, and the birth of her child depicted before the flashback that uncovers the circumstances of her pregnancy. The second section of Das Gelübde explains the events that led up to the mysterious occurrences of the first part, and the paternity of Hermengilda’s child is slowly revealed, just as, in Die Marquise von O… , the father of the child eventually makes an appearance. This second section of Hoffmann’s tale receives a more precise temporal setting than the first, “zu jener Zeit, als nach der ersten Teilung Polens die Insurrektion vorbereitet wurde” (295), presumably at the time of the Polish uprising in defense of the proposed constitution of 1791, which was crushed by Prussian and Russian troops and led to the second partition of Poland in 1793� 7 Another failed uprising, led by Kościuszko in 1794, was followed by the disappearance of Poland from the map after the third partition (1795). Hoffmann, writing in 1817, would have had in mind these events, as well as the subsequent Napoleonic Wars in which some of the Polish nobility participated. Hermengilda’s family of origin is deeply involved in politics, with her father supporting the uprising and Hermengilda displaying political astuteness and participating in discussions of strategy from a early age. For Hoffmann, the Polish struggle for political autonomy is tied to conflicts within the family over patriarchal dominance, as well as to the challenge that his own text presents to the authority of Kleist’s. Within the setting of the family, this dedication to politics is shown to be linked to a patriarchal structure, which is detrimental to its members’ personal autonomy, particularly in the case of Hermengilda. Her father’s dominant position within the family, and the absence of her mother, who died when Hermengilda was young, allow the father’s devotion to a nationalistic cause to devolve into an excessive emphasis on conventional behavior and appearance at the expense of inner, emotional life� This patriarchal, authoritarian family culture contributes to the daughter’s mental confusion, and her eventual deception and rape. The young Hermengilda, though, seems at first to thrive in the atmosphere The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 49 of political discussion, and is described as making many astute contributions to discussions of strategy� A hint that things are not as they seem comes when she is described as appearing “wie ein Engelsbild vom Himmel gesendet zur heiligen Weihe” (295), a phrase that emphasizes her physical beauty and otherworldliness, suggesting that she is a visitor from another realm� The phrase is also an echo of the Marquise’s first impression of Graf F… in Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… : “Der Marquise schien er ein Engel des Himmels zu sein” (105). The Marquise’s first impression of the count is later proven to be false, as his subsequent behavior is far from angelic. Hoffmann, in describing Hermengilda as “ein Engelsbild,” the image of an angel, also emphasizes the danger of relying on appearances in order to determine someone’s role or judge her behavior. Hermengilda’s father fails to take into account her complex emotional life when he arranges her engagement to Graf Stanislaus von R�, another young revolutionary, on the basis of politics and familial alliances, as was common in aristocratic households� A closer connection between the two families was considered politically expedient (“politisch wichtig” [295]), and the insightfulness of both Stanislaus and Hermengilda into political strategies was seen as vital to national interests� Their engagement celebration is described as “patriotische Zusammenkünfte” (295), a phrase that reveals the close connection between patriarchal family structures and national interests� This connection is also shown in the emphasis on the word “Vaterland,” first as a reason for Hermengilda’s acceptance of the engagement with Stanislaus - she sees him as “ein Geschenk des Vaterlandes” (295) - then as the explanation for her rejection of him after the uprising has failed: she claims that she will only marry him “wenn die Fremden aus dem Vaterlande vertrieben sein würden” (296), revealing the dependence of her proposed marriage on political outcomes, such as the autonomy of the “Fatherland�” Her subordination to patriarchal and patriotic structures is further expressed in Stanislaus’s battle cry, “Vaterland - Hermengilda! ” (297), which subsumes her to a concept of patriotism� The narrator even explains her reversal in attitude, from rejection of Stanislaus to realization that she loves him, by appealing to national stereotypes: Polish women supposedly exhibit emotional instability, ranging from “glühende Leidenschaft” to “todstarre Kälte” (296). The emphasis on Hermengilda as an image, both of ideal femininity and of national characteristics, makes clear that there is no room for an inner, emotional life within this patriotic / patriarchal structure� At the same time, Hermengilda attempts to reclaim her image, and challenges the patriarchal interpretation of feminine activitites, such as conception and pregnancy, through her own use of images, created to explain the origin of her child� Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… also introduces a female protagonist who is ruled by patriarchal images and norms of conduct� Although she had left her family 50 Eleanor ter Horst of origin in order to marry, the Marquise returns to the paternal abode after the death of her husband: “Hier hatte sie die nächsten Jahre mit Kunst, Lektüre, mit Erziehung, und ihrer Eltern Pflege beschäftigt, in der größten Eingezogenheit zugebracht” (104). Her isolation from the world outside the family resembles the life of a nun or an unmarried, dependent daughter, both roles that are taken up by Hermengilda in Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde. When the Marquise’s father learns of her pregnancy, which she herself is unable to explain, he banishes her from the home� The Marquise does, however, assert herself to the extent that she refuses to leave the two daughters from her previous marriage with her father, as he demands, and instead takes them with her in defiance of her brother, who attempts to reinforce the father’s orders. This challenge, a revolt of mothers and daughters / sisters against the authority of husbands and fathers is, however, short-lived on the part of the Marquise as well as her mother, who intitally acts against the wishes of her husband by visiting the Marquise and subjecting her to a test, a false announcement that Leopardo, the hunter, is the father of her child. As the Marquise’s shocked reaction to this announcement reveals her innocence, her mother is able to convince the father to let his daughter return to the family residence� 8 The father-daughter reconciliation is narrated as a scene of quasi-incestuous tenderness, which is witnessed by the mother but does not appear to disturb either her or her daughter� 9 The mother sees the Marquise sitting on her father’s lap: Drauf endlich öffnete sie die Tür, und sah nun - und das Herz quoll ihr vor Freuden empor: die Tochter still, mit zurückgebeugtem Nacken, die Augen fest geschlossen, in des Vaters Armen liegen; indessen dieser, auf dem Lehnstuhl sitzend, lange, heiße und lechzende Küsse, das große Auge voll glänzender Tränen, auf ihren Mund drückte: gerade wie ein Verliebter! (138) This scene reveals an extreme version of patriarchal dominance, as the father displaces the Marquise’s husband and reclaims possession of his daughter as his own lover� That the mother reacts not with shock but with approval shows her to be as much subjected to patriarchal strictures as her daughter� While Die Marquise von O… features a female protagonist who is already a widow and a mother at the time the tale begins, her return to the familial abode after the death of her first husband signifies the reversal of her role to a state of dependence and subjection to the rule of the father� Her subsequent banishment from the residence and second return to the father, after her mother establishes her innocence, simply underlines her inability to break away from this extreme form of subjection to the father� 10 The protagonist of Das Gelübde , by contrast, is a young, never-married woman whose father arranges her engagement to Stanislaus for political reasons. Hoffmann’s tale reveals the dominance of men The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 51 within the family structure and the diminishment of women’s experience as contributing factors to Hermengilda’s mental and physical illness. Despite the structural similarities of Die Marquise von O… and Das Gelübde , and their common emphasis on the rule of the father, the narration of the actions that bring about the pregnancies is widely divergent. The Marquise’s impregnation occurs in the text at the site of the infamous “Gedankenstrich” (dash) 11 which indicates a break between as well as a conjoining of two phrases: Graf F… has rescued the Marquise from the soldiers and has taken her into an area of the building untouched by the fire that has broken out, whereupon the Marquise falls into a faint: “Hier - traf er, da bald darauf ihre erschrockenen Frauen erschienen, Anstalten, einen Arzt zu rufen; versicherte, indem er sich den Hut aufsetzte, daß sie sich bald erholen würde; und kehrte in den Kampf zurück” (106). The dash joins the two spaces mentioned, the domestic space (“Hier”) with the site of battle, and also suggests the conjoining of Graf F… with the Marquise, but at the same time indicates a break in the narrative’s flow, shrouding Graf F…’s actions and casting doubt on the paternity of the Marquise’s child. The fracturing of the narrative is also indicated by the separation within the phrase, “traf er… Anstalten.” This phrase, taken as a whole, means that the count made preparations to do something, in this case call a doctor� The verb “treffen” is, however, separated from the noun, “Anstalten,” by an entire clause and, appearing alone, it means “to strike,” “to come together,” or “to encounter�” The idea that the count had a violent sexual encounter with the Marquise is initially suggested by the use of the verb “treffen,” then subverted by the later appearance of the noun, “Anstalten�” The structure of the sentence echoes the structure of the narrative: the sex act occurs during the break in Graf F…’s combat activities, but it is not until much later in the narrative that he identifies himself as the father of her child� The Marquise reluctantly consents to marry him, under the condition that he assume the financial obligations of marriage while renouncing the right to live with her� It is only after her child is born that she consents to a second marriage, which appears to repair the damage that he inflicted on her. 12 The Gedankenstrich thus represents several kinds of fracture: the violation of the Marquise’s body, the break that it produces between herself and Graf F…, the separation of the financial from the physical expectations of marriage, and the obviously inadequate resolution of this damage through the second marriage of the Marquise and Graf F…, which recuperates the patriarchal system of reproduction and inheritance while revealing its deepest flaws. What Kleist indicates with a dash, however, Hoffmann fills in with an entire narration told from two perspectives, that of Hermengilda and that of her rapist, Xaver, who, like Graf F…, later reveals himself as the father of her child. Kleist’s tale includes a suggestion, elaborated by Hoffmann, that what is lacking in the 52 Eleanor ter Horst narration - what is indicated by a dash - must be supplied by the imagination, or fantasy. When the Marquise indicates that her physical symptoms were similar to those she experienced when pregnant with her second daughter, her mother jokes that the Marquise “würde vielleicht den Phantasus gebären, und lachte� Morpheus wenigstens, versetzte die Marquise, oder einer der Träume aus seinem Gefolge, würde sein Vater sein; und scherzte gleichfalls” (109). Phantasos and Morpheus are both mythological figures who appear in Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the sons of Somnus (Sleep). Morpheus has the power to assume the image of any person, imitating his or her speech, clothing and appearance, while Phantasos takes on the form of inanimate objects ( XI 633-45). Ovid narrates how Morpheus assumed the form of Ceyx, the husband of Alcyone, in order to inform her of her husband’s death at sea. A deceptive image is used to reveal the truth. The Marquise’s joke that the shape-shifting Morpheus is the father of her child receives further elaboration in Hoffmann’s tale, which emphasizes the deceptive quality of images, as well as their revelatory potential, and narrates a pregnancy that comes about when one man (Xaver) usurps the image of another (Stanislaus), just as Ovid’s Morpheus assumes the shape of Ceyx. Xaver’s purpose is, however, deceptive, while Morpheus’s is revelatory of truth. What are we then to make of the Morpheus-like move of Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde , which assumes the form (plot and structure) of Kleist’s tale, while claiming preeminent status as originary text or father? The suggestion is that the act of appropriating an image or narrative form does not necessarily degrade the appropriator; rather, truth or greater narrative vitality can sometimes be found not in the first but in the second iteration or image; however, the deceptive behavior of Xaver with respect to Hermengilda does give rise to some doubt as to the advisability of physical or literary appropriation� The conception of Hermengilda’s child comes about as a result of the substitution of one man’s image for another, much as Morpheus assumes the shape of Ceyx in the Metamorphoses � After Hermengilda has rejected Stanslaus and he has enlisted in the French military, she is overcome by regret to the point that she becomes mentally unbalanced� It is in this state of longing for the absent Stanislaus that she first encounters Xaver, whom she mistakes for her fiancé: “Sie schaute sich um, erblickte einen Offizier in voller Uniform der französischen Jägergarde, der den linken Arm in der Binde trug, und stürzte mit dem lauten Ruf: ‘Stanislaus, mein Stanislaus! ’ ihm ohnmächtig in die Arme” (298). The period of unconsciousness recalls the Marquise’s fainting spell after Graf F… has rescued her from the soldiers. In Das Gelübde , however, this first loss of consciousness anticipates the more elaborate deception that follows� The encounter looks like a reunion of lovers, but once Hermengilda awakens, Xaver reveals that the basis of this passion is an error (“Irrtum” [299]) that is founded The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 53 on externalities (a family resemblance between Xaver and his cousin, Stanislaus, as well as Xaver’s appearance in the apparel of a French officer, a uniform that Stanislaus had also taken up after Hermengilda rejected him). Hermengilda’s father is deceived by the same physical resemblance, and further encourages the substitution of one suitor for another� 13 Described as a person completely preoccupied with superficial images (“keines Blickes in die Tiefe fähig” [303]), the father soon forgets Stanislaus and considers Xaver to be his daughter’s fiancé. Meanwhile, Xaver confuses Hermengilda by reassuring her of Stanislaus’s devotion, while at the same time substituting his own image for that of his cousin: “[er wußte] geschickt sein eigenes Bild durchschimmern zu lassen” (303). This deliberate process of deception through the substitution of one image for another culminates in the garden scene, where Xaver manipulates Hermengilda’s image of Stanislaus to take advantage of her sexually. Like Ovid’s Morpheus, he takes on the identity of Hermengilda’s husband, elaborating on Kleist’s suggestion that Morpheus is the father of the Marquise’s child. When Xaver comes upon Hermengilda, who, in a kind of trance, believes that she is being married to Stanislaus, he inserts himself into the fantasy and plays the role of Stanislaus, with the result that Hermengilda becomes pregnant and believes Stanislaus to be the father of her child. Xaver’s actions are not revealed until later, after the discovery of Hermengilda’s mysterious pregnancy. Hermengilda has her own interpretation of the actions that led to the conception of her child, and describes her marriage to Stanislaus and his subsequent death in battle in great detail to her father, as an explanation for the widow’s clothing that she is wearing: “Damit du in mir die Witwe des Grafen Stanislaus von R. erkennst” (305). She seeks to counteract her father’s image of her as a young woman predisposed to mental instability with the image of a grieving widow� This is precisely the image that Ovid’s Morpheus, in the guise of Ceyx, wishes to impress upon Alcyone, who is still waiting for her husband to return from the sea voyage during which he drowned� Morpheus as Ceyx emphasizes the truth of what he is revealing to Alcyone: “Non haec tibi nuntiat auctor ambiguus, non ista vagis rumoribus audis: ipse ego fata tibi praesens mea naufragus edo� Surge, age, da lacrimas lugubriaque indue nec me indeploratum sub inania Tartara mitte.” ( XI 666-70) “And this tale no uncertain messenger brings to you, nor do you hear it in the words of vague report; but I myself, wrecked as you see me, tell you of my fate� Get you up, then, and weep for me; put on your mourning garments and let me not go unlamented to the cheerless land of shades.” (167) 54 Eleanor ter Horst Ovid’s “auctor ambiguus,” translated here as “uncertain messenger,” is etymologically related to the English and German words for “author; ” but “auctor” also means “father” or “progenitor�” Morpheus denies that he is this uncertain messenger / author / progenitor, but his claim to be Ceyx is false, as the preceding description of his ability to assume the appearance of any person makes clear; however, it is only through this deceptive image that Alcyone learns the truth about her husband’s fate. Hoffmann’s reference to Ovid through Kleist thus juxtaposes the deceptiveness of images and the ambiguity of paternity with the truth-telling potential of an image that is judged by others to be false: Hermengilda perceives herself as a widow and Stanislaus as the legitimate father of her child, while Xaver and her father believe Xaver to be the progenitor and the child to be illegitimate. Hoffmann thus casts Kleist and himself in the role of “auctor ambiguus,” whose authority as author and progenitor of tales is both validated and called into question� Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde casts into doubt one of the premises of Kleist’s novella, which depicts the Marquise as a respectable widow trying to solve the mystery of her own pregnancy� In Das Gelübde , it is Hermengilda’s very identity as a widow that is called into question, when her father dismisses the narrative of her marriage to Stanislaus as a “vision” (306), which merely reflects his daughter’s disturbed mental state. The arrival of Fürstin Z. allows for a different interpretation of Hermengilda’s experience. The Fürstin, who is the sister of Hermengilda’s father, Graf Nepomuk von C., and thus Hermengilda’s aunt, challenges the patriarchal version of reality, looking beneath the surface at Hermengilda’s complex emotional life. The role of the Fürstin as both sister to Graf Nepomuk and substitute mother to Hermengilda - we learn that she stands in for Hermengilda’s mother, who died when she was young (307) - is crucial to understanding the challenge that she poses to the views of her brother and her husband. While her father and uncle believe that Hermengilda is practicing deceit with her story of being Stanislaus’s widow, her aunt finds that she is sincere in this belief, and even proposes the idea that a psychic connection (“geistige Zusammenkunft” [311]) between Hermengilda and Stanislaus might have given rise to a physical pregnancy. The men’s reaction to this idea is laughter, but the supposition is no more ridiculous than the religious narrative of the Virgin Mary impregnated by the Holy Spirit, and in fact could be seen as a reworking of religious dogma� 14 Although the aunt’s / sister’s theory is later challenged by Xaver’s account of events, her intuition about a psychic connection proves to be correct, since it is later discovered that Stanislaus died on the same day that Hermengilda had perceived his death while in her tracelike state. When the Fürstin learns this fact, she exclaims, “‘Hermengilda - armes Kind! - Welches unerforschliche Geheimnis! ’” (312), emphasizing the resistance of the events The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 55 narrated by Hermengilda to rational interpretation� The suggestion that Das Gelübde , rather than Die Marquise von O… , is the originary tale is equally counterintuitive, a reversal of the “natural” order� A parallel inversion of natural processes related to the origins of life is to be found in Kleist’s tale, and is broached during the Marquise’s conversation with the midwife, whom she calls in to disprove the pregnancy diagnosed by the male doctor� The Marquise asks the midwife: wie denn die Natur auf ihren Wegen walte? Und ob die Möglichkeit einer unwissentlichen Empfängnis sei? - Die Hebamme lächelte, machte ihr das Tuch los, und sagte, das würde ja doch der Frau Marquise Fall nicht sein� Nein, nein, antwortete die Marquise, sie habe wissentlich empfangen, sie wolle nur im allgemeinen wissen, ob diese Erscheinung im Reiche der Natur sei? Die Hebamme versetzte, daß dies, außer der heiligen Jungfrau, noch keinem Weibe auf Erden zugestoßen wäre. (124) Although the idea that the Marquise has conceived in the same manner as the Virgin Mary is negated by Graf F…’s claim to be the father of her child, 15 the suggestion of another explanation for the pregnancy, however improbable, cannot be entirely dismissed� 16 Indeed, Kleist emphasizes the Marquise’s conviction that the mystery surrounding the conception of her child suggests a divine origin: Nur der Gedanke war ihr unerträglich, daß dem jungen Wesen, das sie in der größten Unschuld und Reinheit empfangen hatte, und dessen Ursprung, eben weil er geheimnisvoller war, auch göttlicher zu sein schien, als der anderer Menschen, ein Schandfleck in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft ankleben sollte. (126-27) The emphasis on “Unschuld” and “Reinheit” connects the mysterious conception of the Marquise’s child to the immaculate conception of Jesus. Her conviction that the origin of her son is divine puts her at odds with society, which judges her actions to be shameful and will consign her son to the status of a bastard� This realization prompts her to place the newspaper announcement, mentioned at the beginning of the novella, that asks the father of the child to reveal himself� Though profoundly unconventional in its revelation of something that would normally be kept secret, the newspaper announcement sets in motion the process that leads the Marquise to marry Graf F… and produce other, legitimate children with him (“eine ganze Reihe von jungen Russen” [143]), thus leading to her reintegration into patriarchal society� The mystery surrounding the conception of the Marquise’s child is, however, never fully resolved in Kleist’s tale: the “auctor” remains “ambiguus.” Hoffmann expands on the notions of secrecy and mystery related to conception, broadening these ideas to pertain to the obscure origins of both his and Kleist’s texts. In Das Gelübde , the presence of two, competing explanations for the origin of 56 Eleanor ter Horst Hermengilda’s child precludes the possibility of a resolution through marriage between Hermengilda and Xaver; instead, the religious vow of the title replaces the marriage vows that were anticipated for Hermengilda� In Die Marquise von O… , however, the threat to the social order implicit in the mysterious pregnancy is resolved through marriage, even as the mystery itself is far from adequately clarified. Das Gelübde goes further in giving the female protagonist a claim that vies with the men’s interpretation of the pregnancy: Hermengilda insists that Stanislaus, not Xaver, is the father of her child, and even claims to have proof, “die überzeugendsten Beweise” (307), for her claim. The use of the word “überzeugen” is remarkable here, since its root is “zeugen,” meaning both to bear witness and to conceive� 17 The suggestion then is that some process beyond or above (“über”) the biological act of reproduction has led to the child’s conception� Xaver, however, along with the other male characters, including Hermengilda’s father and uncle, adheres to a biological explanation for paternity, and appeals to patriarchal notions of propriety and female honor in an attempt to persuade Hermengilda to marry him: “‘ meine Buhlschaft warst du und bleibst du, wenn ich dich nicht erhebe zu meiner Gattin’” (314). Hermengilda’s refusal to conform to patriarchal expectations that she marry her rapist make her into an exile within her own family and allow an opening for another “father,” the monk Pater Cyprianus, to take control of her external appearance, if not of her inner life� He presents Hermengilda to her biological family in her new role as nun, but this role is in many ways a continuation of her role within her male-dominated family, since the monk, like her father, places more emphasis on her physical appearance than on her spiritual or emotional life: “Nie wird die Welt mehr das Antlitz schauen, dessen Schönheit den Teufel anlockte� - Schaut her - ! So beginnt und vollendet Cölestine ihre Buße! ” Damit hob der Mönch Hermengildas Schleier auf, und schneidendes Weh durchfuhr alle, da sie die blasse Totenlarve erblickten, in die Hermengildas engelschönes Antlitz auf immer verschlossen! (316) Not only is Hermengilda’s face hidden, but her inner life is completely concealed behind the double covering of the veil and the mask� Pater Cyprianus thus displaces the mystery surrounding Hermengilda’s pregnancy onto Hermengilda herself� The contrast between his interpretation of her beauty as an enticement for the devil and her family’s memory of her angelic beauty (“Engelschönes Antlitz”) brings to the fore the mystery of Hermengilda’s inner life, which remains unexplored, despite the evidence of her mental illness, as manifested in her spells of unconsciousness and automaton-like behavior� 18 This emphasis on the resistance of appearance to interpretation is in many ways a reversal and an The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 57 extension of Kleist’s suggestions about the Marquise’s perceptions of Graf F… . As we have seen, Graf F… appears to the Marquise as “ein Engel des Himmels; ” however, this perception proves to be false� The Marquise uses this reversal of perception to explain her initial refusal to marry Graf F…, after his appearance at her father’s house, following the newspaper announcement, reveals him to be a rapist: “er würde ihr damals nicht wie ein Teufel erschienen sein, wenn er ihr nicht, bei seiner ersten Erscheinung, wie ein Engel vorgekommen wäre” (143). Hoffmann displaces the Marquise’s dualistic perception of Graf F… onto Hermengilda, whose family interprets her beauty as angelic, of divine origin, while the religious establishment considers it to be associated with the devil� This conflict over the interpretation of an image, Hermengilda’s appearance, parallels the conflict surrounding interpretations of Hermengilda’s pregnancy: she considers her child to have been conceived within a divinely sanctioned marriage to Stanislaus, while her family and Xaver believe that the child was illegitimately conceived, as a result of Xaver’s deception. This conflict cannot be resolved, as it is in Die Marquise von O… , since Hermengilda refuses to consent to a marriage to Xaver. Her father’s solution, then, is simply to conceal his daughter’s pregnancy by sending her away with her aunt: “wenn da Hermengilda selbst gar kein Geheimnis aus ihrem Zustande machte, so mußte sie, sollte ihr Ruf verschont bleiben, freilich aus dem Kreise der Bekannten entfernt werden” (311). The solution of concealing what cannot be resolved through the process of marriage and reintegration into the social order is heightened by Pater Cyprianus’s action of concealing Hermengilda’s face behind a mask and a veil. Although Hermengilda’s biological family reacts with horror at the death mask (“Totenlarve”) that conceals her face, this mask is nothing more than the physical manifestation of the repression that has been required of her as a member of this family� As a girl and young woman, Hermengilda was taught to value her father’s desire for propriety, the requirements of the “Vaterland,” and finally her religious duties to “father” Cyprianus over her own emotional life. The mask’s purpose is to hide her face, now reinterpreted in a religious context as associated with the devil, but it in fact reveals the death of Hermengilda’s emotional life and the abnegation of self imposed on her by her family as well as by religion. Hermengilda’s new identity as a religious “sister” removes the subversive potential of sisterhood that is latent in Kleist’s novella and that is suggested in the challenges to male authority posed by her father’s sister, Fürstin Z�, and by Hermengilda herself as rebellious daughter� The emotional dimension of Hermengilda’s existence and the young woman’s sexuality cannot remain completely hidden, however, since the birth of her healthy son belies this mask of piety and death. The son’s mysterious, seemingly immaculate conception suggests a connection to a Christ figure, and Hermen- 58 Eleanor ter Horst gilda’s aunt’s remarks also raise the possibility of a spiritual cause for the pregnancy, with the result that the child’s role as Christ-like mediator is emphasized: “Der Knabe schien, wie ein sühnender Mittler, Cölestinen dem Menschlichen wieder näher zu bringen” (291). The boy effects a rapprochement between humanity and divinity, creating sympathy for the remote and pious Cölestine, just as Christ made God more accessible to humanity� On the model of Christ, this boy is sacrificed by his father, Xaver, who in reality bears little resemblance to a divine father and whose carelessness causes the child to die of cold� The child’s birth emphasizes the dual identities of both mother and father. The nun, Cölestine, whose veiled and masked face denies the possibility of emotion and sexuality, contrasts with the vigorous young woman, Hermengilda, whose initial acceptance of her father’s values - an emphasis on appearance and a subordination of individual desires to the demands of family and fatherland - develops into resistance to patriarchal control: her insistence that Stanislaus is the father of her child and her refusal to marry Xaver in order to conform to male notions of female honor� A continuity between her two identities is in fact suggested by her religious name, “Cölestine,” suggesting a celestial or spiritual existence, which she takes on in an effort to efface her physical beauty but which draws attention to the initial description of her as “ein Engelsbild vom Himmel gesendet.” Hermengilda’s family of origin and the religious “family” which she later joins both have the tendency to associate women with a certain image - physical beauty and purity - that requires a sacrifice of inner life and autonomy� Xaver is likewise presented under a dual aspect, as the reincarnation of the heroic Stanislaus, who sacrificed himself for the fatherland and the woman he loved; and as the deceitful young man who uses seductive language and a physical resemblance to the heroic ideal in order to gain access to Hermengilda� The tendency of both Hermengilda and Xaver to hide their past and disguise their sexuality and emotional life has the opposing effect of drawing attention to their murky origins, as well as to the mysterious “conceptions” central to both Kleist’s and Hoffmann’s narration. Just as Hermengilda has difficulty distinguishing Xaver from Stanislaus, and the reader has difficulty sorting out the identitities of Hermengilda, who appears both in the guise of a nun and that of a young Polish aristocrat, Hoffmann presents his tale and Kleist’s as two images, calling into question which one of them is the original or “real” version and which is a fantasy or “vision.” Is his tale merely a copy of Kleist’s, or is it an image that, like Ovid’s Morpheus, reveals some truths even as it assumes the form of another? Hoffmann’s tale emphasizes both resemblance and difference in relation to Kleist’s, as it focuses on interaction with and accommodation to an other who is at times a twin (brother or sister) and at times a diametrical opposite� The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 59 Hoffmann establishes a similarly ambiguious interplay between resemblance and difference with the relationship of his tale’s female protagonist to Kleist’s. Like Kleist’s Marquise, Hermengilda is banished from her father’s house, but unlike the Marquise, she does not return there, nor does she reconcile with her father� Instead, she takes up residence in the house of strangers, the German Bürgermeister and his family� The reactions of the family to the young woman range from sympathy and respect (“inniges Mitleid und tiefe Ehrfurcht” [289]) for her nun-like existence of deprivation and solitude, to revulsion at the sinister impression created by her veil and the face (or mask, as it turns out) beneath it� The wife and the daughter of the Bürgermeister both catch a glimpse of the countenance hidden by the veil, which is described by the mother as “totenbleich” and the daughter as “marmorweiß” (290), both adjectives suggesting an existence on the border between life and death, art and reality� 19 Hermengilda, it is suggested, has been transformed into an image of herself, in a way that reveals the artifice constraining her existence in patriarchal society. The eventual birth of a healthy son (“ein gesundes, holdes Knäblein” [291]), however, contradicts the impression of artifice and morbidity created by the mask and veil� The emergence of healthy life from an apparently sinister source allows for the possibility of reconciliation and integration of mother and child into the German family� The birth “vernichtete in seinen Folgen das drückende unheimliche Verhältnis mit der Fremden” (291). The young mother is no longer a foreign presence in the family� The Bürgermeister even acts as if the child were his grandson; however, the veil continues to function as a barrier between the young woman and the German family until the arrival of the child’s father, who violently removes the child from the household and, in the struggle, tears the veil from Cölestine’s face, revealing a white mask beneath. This second facial covering is not removed narratively until the following section of the tale, which reveals the identity of Cölestine as Hermengilda and also peels back the layers of masks hiding the identity of the child’s father, who is revealed as Xaver, the double of Hermengilda’s fiancé, Stanislaus, as well as his polar opposite. Hermengilda’s existence as a “Fremde,” a foreign presence, in the house of the German Bürgermeister is even more striking in light of the fact that she had refused to marry Stanislaus until the “foreign” occupying forces were expelled from Poland (“wenn die Fremden aus dem Vaterlande vertrieben sein würden” [296])� Her initial attitude of resistance to foreignness proves to be equally disastrous for her personal happiness and for Poland as a whole� Set during the period of a failed revolution, Das Gelübde shows the Polish nobility’s futile attempt to liberate itself from the influence of the “foreign” occupying forces (Prussian, Russian and Austrian). By the same token, Hermengilda’s father’s attempt to remove a rebellious and scandalous daughter from his family, and her entry 60 Eleanor ter Horst into the family of the German Bürgermeister, where she herself becomes a foreigner or stranger (“Fremde”), leads not to a renewal of the family’s reputation but rather to the end of the family line: after Hermengilda’s death, her father is obliged to transfer his estate to his nephews, since he has no direct descendants� By contrast, Graf F… in Die Marquise von O… gives the Marquise two documents after the birth of her son, the first a deed of a gift (20,000 rubles) to the boy, the second a will in which he leaves her his entire estate in the event of his death� It is only after receiving these two documents that the Marquise allows Graf F… to court her for a second time, and consents to a second marriage, leading to further legitimate children� The contrast is clear: Die Marquise von O… shows the reintegration of the female protagonist into the patriarchal social order by means of a monetary and legal transaction which forms the basis for marriage, while revealing the cracks in the structure supposed to ensure seamless succession� Das Gelübde shows the failure of patriarchal society to accommodate a rebellious daughter who refuses marriage, and the end of the family line resulting from this failure� Despite the seemingly dim prospects that Das Gelübde holds out for the liberatory potential of political revolution or personal rebellion, some hope is to be found in the gradual integration of Hermengilda / Cölestine into the German family, even as she is rejected by her own family of origin� The members of the German family at first view her as unapproachably foreign, but come to see through the mask and the veil, and, after witnessing the birth of her son, arrive at an appreciation of her human qualities� The border between Poland and Germany, which E. T. A. Hoffmann himself crossed during the period when he worked in Prussian-occupied Poland and married a Polish woman, is more porous than it might seem. Incursion into another’s territory, and the interaction that results, can have positive consequences, in politics as well as in art� In Das Gelübde , Hoffmann presents the foreign “other” as another, related version of the self, as evidenced in the doubling of the characters, Hermengilda and Xaver / Stanislaus, and in the dual interpretation of Hermengilda’s pregnancy, the possibility that either Xaver or Stanislaus could be the father of her child. The “auctor ambiguus” proves to be a key figure for the understanding of conception and authorship� On the other hand, this ambiguity, related to the assumption of another’s form, is associated with violation and violence. Hoffmann’s incursion into Kleist’s territory, by placing his work at the stated origin of Kleist’s, could be seen as an aggressive move similar to the territorial expansion practiced by the Prussians, Russians and Austrians at the expense of Poland� As we have seen, Hoffmann’s tale begins in the north, the region from which Kleist claims that his tale was displaced� Just as Kleist links the rape of the Marquise with territorial aggression by setting it during the occupation of the citadel by the The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 61 invading Russians, so Hoffmann appropriates and displaces Kleist’s story and its status as the originary text� This appropriation could be seen as a reenactment of the rapes that form the subject of both tales. Hoffmann claims paternity and displaces the original father of the tale, Kleist, in the same way that, within the narrative, Xaver attempts to displace Stanislaus as Hermengilda’s fiancé and the father of her child� In Das Gelübde , the rape, unlike the one suggested in Die Marquise von O… , does not produce any surviving offspring. Hoffmann implies that an act of aggressive appropriation does not lead to a fruitful outcome, and thus incorporates a critique of his own appropriation of Kleist’s tale into his own narrative� Hoffmann not only appropriates the origin of Kleist’s tale, northern Europe (Prussian-occupied Poland), he also encroaches on its substitute locale, Italy. The final section of Das Gelübde is set in Italy, but not in the war-torn north, as Kleist’s tale is, but rather in a peaceful setting, a monastery near Naples. Naples is also the destination of Kleist’s Graf F…, who is ordered to carry military dispatches to that city, and must therefore reluctantly leave the Marquise, and defer his courtship of her until he returns� His marriage to her is thus delayed significantly, and almost fails to occur, because of his military obligations. Hoffmann’s overlaying of a military campaign, referenced in Kleist, with the peaceful seclusion of a monastery is not only a futher displacement of the setting of Kleist’s tale, but also a reworking of Graf F…’s temporary separation from the Marquise and of the garden scene that occurs when he returns from Naples� Banished from her father’s house, the Marquise has retreated to the estate that she shared with her former husband, and decides to live in monastic seclusion, “in ewig klösterlicher Eingezogenheit” (126). This resolve is, however, broken by the encroachment of Graf F… into the garden of the Marquise’s estate. He enters the garden by devious means, “durch eine hintere Pforte, die ich offen fand” (129), as he himself admits. His entry into a forbidden space reenacts his rape of the Marquise� This time, however, she is not unconscious but fully capable of resisting his advances, sending him away despite his offer to marry her. Hoffmann refers to this scene when he sets the rape of Hermengilda, and the subsequent encounter when Xaver asks to marry her, in a pavillion in the park of her home� These two encounters both constitute violations, as Xaver first takes advantage of her semi-conscious state, then tries to argue that the violation obligates her to marry him� The garden and pavillion scenes are, in turn, reenacted at the end of Hoffmann’s tale in a double violation, as Hoffmann appropriates both the hidden origin (northern Europe) and the destination (Italy) of Kleist’s novella. The ending of Hoffmann’s narrative itself reenacts the violation of a woman that occurred previously in his own tale, as well as in Kleist’s. Boleslaw von Z., who may be one 62 Eleanor ter Horst of the nephews who inherited Hermengilda’s father’s estate, travels to Naples, visits a Camaldolese monastery - the Camaldolese are an eremetical order - and encounters a monk whom he believes to be Xaver� The monk is reading a Polish prayer book, and his features, though distorted by grief (“durch tiefen Gram enstellt” [317]), stir a vague memory (“eine dunkle Erinnerung” [317]), in Boleslaw. The monk flees, and Boleslaw is unable to confirm his impression. The violation of the monk’s tranquility by Boleslaw is a reenactment as well as a reversal of Xaver’s violation of Hermengilda, and Graf F…’s violation of the Marquise. It could also be read as a commentary on the subjugation of Hermengilda and the Marquise to paternal / patriarchal rule: Boleslaw is, after all, heir to the father� On a metaphorical level, the ending of Hoffmann’s tale is both a reenactment of and a commentary on his violation of Kleist’s tale through reappropriation of its content and origin. Appropriating the originary role of paternity, Hoffmann nonetheless emphasizes that obscurity and uncertainty are associated with the father’s role that he takes on: the monk in the garden is not necessarily Xaver and, if he is, he does not wish to be known: he veils his face and flees, just as Hermengilda hid behind the mask of Cölestine. Hoffmann reverses and undermines his own claims to paternity by placing the father of Hermengilda’s child, Xaver, in the role of violated victim and introducing another dominant father figure, Boleslaw, to take on the role of aggressor. The cyclical movement, the displacement of one father figure by another, suggests that this process is far from complete, and that Hoffmann, despite his claim to preeminence, may be its next victim. Hoffmann challenges Kleist and attempts to reverse the laws of succession, by which a later text borrows from its predecessor� Obscuring the origins of his work in relation to Kleist’s, he suggests that art does not follow the laws of biological succession, that from a murky origin, and from confrontation with the other, may emerge a challenging creation� The need for a clear line of succession, demanded by conventional paternity, vies with the obscurity and mystery surrounding conception and birth, both the biological processes and their metaphorical application to the work of art� Vying interpretations of circumstances such as Hermengilda’s pregnancy, as well as the presence of two versions of the same character, shape a text, Das Gelübde , that in some ways resembles Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… , but that also challenges it, not as a son would challenge a father but as a Doppelgänger, a mysterious brother or sister, challenges the very notion of temporal succession, of the distinction between original and copy� The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 63 Notes 1 Das Gelübde was published as part of the collection, Nachtstücke , whose most well-known story is Der Sandmann � It shares several themes with this tale and others in the collection, including the idea of the human being as automaton, the Doppelgänger, mental illness, and medical discourses more generally. Steinecke’s remark (1022) that Hoffmann’s tale has been neglected in literary criticism still holds true today, with a few exceptions� Recent critical approaches address its connection to medical and psychological discourses (Ferro Milone; Catani), aesthetic theory (Liebrand), and contemporary politics (Połczyńska, Rohde). 2 Kleist’s novella has also had resonance in popular culture. Maierhofer and Athreya analyze a contemporary film, Julietta , which sets the Kleistian plot in early 21 st -century Berlin� 3 Steinecke remarks that it has been read as “eine schlechte Weiterführung des kleistschen Motivs” (1023). Weitin, for example, sees it as lacking theoretical sophistication and influence in comparison to Kleist’s works (165). By contrast, Harich advances the idea that Hoffmann’s version is more complex with regard to human motivations than Kleist’s (128). 4 Bloom’s enumeration of the ways in which a poem relates to or revises its predecessor includes “ pophrades , or the return of the dead (15),” a move by which the successor poem gives the impression of preceding its precursor, reversing the temporality of imitation (141-55). 5 Sembdner, in his notes on Die Marquise von O… , suggests that Kleist’s story may derive from an anecdote in Montaigne’s essay, “De L’Yvrognerie,” which recounts the circumstances of a widow with a “chaste” reputation who, finding herself mysteriously pregnant, announces in church that she will marry the father of her child, if he declares himself� A servant confesses to having taken advantage of her when she was unconscious from heavy drinking. They continue to live together as a married couple (11). If Montaigne is indeed the source for Kleist’s story, Kleist has moved the scene of the action from France to Italy and has transposed the tale of a peasant woman and a male servant onto two people of aristocratic status, thus creating a geographical as well as a social displacement� A trace of the Montaigne anecdote may remain in the Marquise’s mother’s suggestion that Leopardo, the hunter, is the father of the Marquise’s child. Another source mentioned by Sembdner (900), citing Alfred Klaar’s 1922 edition of Die Marquise von O… , is the story, “Gerettete Unschuld” from the Berlinisches Archiv der Zeit und ihres Geschmacks � This story, involving a traveling salesman who rapes the innkeeper’s daughter, whom he believes to be dead 64 Eleanor ter Horst but who is in reality unconscious, is more brutal and direct than either Kleist’s or Hoffmann’s novella. Dünnhaupt mentions Cervantes’s novella, La fuerza de la sangre , which also recounts a rape that took place when the woman was unconscious, as a possible source for Kleist (147-57). Some of the other Novelas ejemplares by Cervantes also have scenes involving rape and / or mysterious births� In La ilustre fregona , the noble origins of the scullery maid are obscured when her mother, who was raped, gives birth in secret, and gives the child to the innkeeper and his wife to raise� La señora Cornelia also features a protagonist who gives birth in secret and a child who reunites the parents. Finally, Cervantes’s Don Quijote contains the episode of Dorotea, raped by Don Fernando, who abandons her to marry another woman, Luscinda� Luscinda then faints when she is about to marry Don Fernando (Part I, Chapter 28). These episodes suggest a Cervantine influence on Kleist and Hoffmann. 6 Połczyńska argues that Das Gelübde reflects Hoffmann’s sympathy for Poland, and, at the same time, his critical stance towards certain attitudes characteristic of the Polish nobility (157-59). Rohde reads the character of Hermengilda as an allegory of the fate of Poland (37-41). 7 The first partition of Poland took place 1772; however, the explicit references to the Kościuszko uprising would place the action of the story in the period leading up to the second partition of 1793� 8 Birkhold argues that the Marquise’s mother and father are operating under two different legal codes. The father follows the older, honor-based legal system while the mother operates under the assumptions of Prussia’s more recent legal code, the Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preußischen Staaten (4-5). This divide between male and female characters also applies to Das Gelübde , in which Hermengilda’s father also adheres to an honor-based code, while the mother-figure, Fürstin Z., questions Hermengilda in a manner that recalls the investigation by the Marquise’s mother in Kleist. 9 Weiss points out that this scene could be read as a parody of reunion scenes in popular, sentimental fiction and drama of Kleist’s time (538-41). 10 Abbott reads the Marquise’s trajectory differently. By looking at metaphors of standing in the novella, he traces the Marquise’s journey from subjection to patriarchal order through the rule of the father and the rape to “her decision to stand and assert a different order” (111). 11 The dash has been subject to numerous interpretations� One issue is that the term “rape,” or the German equivalent, “Vergewaltigung,” was not used during this period; rather “Notzucht” was the legal term employed (Maierhof and Athreya 365). Some critics (e.g., McAllister 183) suggest that the Marquise was not raped but rather that she played an active role in the sex- The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 65 ual encounter� Cohn argues that the Marquise suppressed erotic knowledge from her conscious mind (131). Others emphasize that a rape did occur, and has been suppressed by interpreters of the tale, as it is in the narrative itself (Winnett 68). Dietrich argues that the elided rape reappears, in another form, in the count’s dream of throwing mud at a white swan, which is an androgynous, indeterminate symbol representing not only the rape but also the related sullying of the count’s honor (325-26). Maierhofer and Athreya emphasize that the narrative structure of the novella prevents the rape from being seen as an act of violence (369). Chaouli argues that the dash obliges the reader to imagine a rape, whose psychic effect is to foreclose other readings (171-74). 12 Weineck notes that the seemingly happy ending “resembles a farce” (150). Künzel stresses, similarly, that the ending seems forced and produces irritation in the reader (178). They are perhaps responding to critics such as Borchardt, who maintains that use of the archetype of the androgyne allows for a reconciliation between men and women in Die Marquise von O… , as well as in other works by Kleist (159). 13 Wright notes that the doubling of the figure Stanislaus / Xaver recalls the doubling of Colino / Nicolo in Kleist’s Der Findling (122-28). 14 McGlathery reads Hermengilda’s identification with the Virgin Mary differently, as part of her attempt to “escape from sexual awareness into spritualistic fantasy” (74). 15 In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a debate was occurring in the medical communities about whether women had to experience sexual pleasure in order to conceive� The mounting evidence that orgasm was not necessary for conception was interpreted as a sign of women’s innate passivity (Laqueur 161-63). The midwife of Die Marquise von O… adheres to an earlier notion that women’s active participation in the sex act was necessary for reproduction, but the circumstances of the story prove her wrong� 16 Weineck suggests that, in addition to Graf F…, there are two other candidates for the father of the Marquise’s child, her own father and Leopardo (150). Similarly, Krüger-Fürhoff indicates that the text provides insufficient proof that Graf F… is the father (77). 17 For Weineck, these meanings of “zeugen” suggest “the need to establish paternity through an act of signification or an oath” (144). 18 Some recent criticism of Das Gelübde has looked at Hoffmann’s interest in medical discourses of his time, as reflected in the tale. Ferro Milone points out the similarity of the tale to medical case studies (68). Catani looks at Hoffmann’s use of medical discourses surrounding madness and sanity, 66 Eleanor ter Horst sickness and health, in order to point out his ambivalence about the privileging of one term over the other (175-76). Critics of Kleist have noted similarities between Kleist’s presentation of unconsciously driven female characters and medical discourses, including Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert’s descriptions of the states of somnambulism and “animal magnetism” (hypnosis)� See for example Paulin, who focuses on concepts of metamorphosis in Schubert, such as transitions between life and death, and the presence of these concepts in Penthesilea (47-49). Thomas argues, however, that Kleist was more likely to have stimulated Schubert’s interest in these topics than Schubert was to have influenced Kleist (259-61). 19 Liebrand interprets Hermengilda’s mask as an inversion of the Pygmalion myth: instead of a statue being brought to life, a living person is made into a statue (175-76). Works Cited Abbott, Scott. “‘Andre Umstände’: Erection as Self-Assertion in Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… ” Heinrich von Kleist: Style and Concept: Explorations of Literary Dissonance � Ed. Dieter Sevin and Christoph Zeller. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. 101-12. Birkhold, Matthew H� “The Trial of the Marquise of O …: A Case for Enlightened Jurisprudence? ” Germanic Review 87.1 (2012): 1-18. Bloom, Harold� The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry � London: Oxford UP , 1973� Borchardt, Edith� Mythische Strukturen im Werk Heinrich von Kleists � New York: Peter Lang, 1987� Catani, Stephanie. “Der Wahnsinn hat Methode. Das ‘Andere der Vernunft’ in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung ‘Das Gelübde.’” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 129.2 (2010), 173-183. Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de� Don Quijote de la Mancha � Barcelona: Editorial Juventud, 1971� —� Novelas ejemplares � Madrid: Castalia, 1982� Chaouli, Michel� “Irresistible Rape: The Lure of Closure in ‘ The Marquise of O… .’” Yale Journal of Criticism: Interpretation in the Humanities 17.1 (2004 Spring): 51-81. Cohn, Dorritt. “Kleist’s Marquise von O … : The Problem of Knowledge�” Monatshefte 67.2 (1975): 129-44. Dietrick, Linda. “Immaculate Conceptions: The Marquise von O… and the Swan.” Seminar 27.4 (1991): 316-29. Dünnhaupt, Gerhard. “Kleist’s Marquise von O … and its Literary Debt to Cervantes�” Arcadia 10.2 (1975): 147-57. Ferro Milone, Giulia. “Mesmerismus und Wahnsinn in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Erzählung ‘Das Gelübde.’” Focus on German Studies 20.1 (2013): 63-77. Harich, Walther. E. T. A. Hoffmann: Das Leben eines Künstlers � Vol� 2� Berlin: Reiß, 1920� The Origins of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Das Gelübde and Kleist’s Die Marquise von O… 67 Hoffmann, E. T. A. Das Gelübde. E. T. A. Hoffmann: Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden � Vol 3� Ed� Hartmut Steinecke� Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985� 285-317. Kleist, Heinrich von� Die Marquise von O…. Sämtliche Werke und Briefe � Vol� 2� Ed� Helmut Sembdner. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001. 104-43. Krüger-Fürhoff, Irmela Marei. “Epistemological Asymmetries and Erotic Stagings: Father-Daughter Incest in Heinrich von Kleist’s The Marquise of O… �” Women in German Yearbook 12 (1996): 71-86. Künzel, Christine� “Heinrich von Kleists ‘ Die Marquise von O… ’: Anmerkungen zur Repräsentation von Vergewaltigung, Recht und Gerechtigkeit in Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft�” Figurationen 1.1 (2000): 165-81. Laqueur Thomas� Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud � Cambridge: Harvard UP , 1990� Liebrand, Claudia. “Puppenspiele. E. T. A. Hoffmanns Nachtstück Das Gelübde �” Der Mensch als Konstrukt. Festschrift für Rudolf Drux zum 60. Geburtstag � Ed� Rolf Füllmann. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2008. 171-79. Maierhofer, Waltraud and Ambika Athreya. “‘Ich will nichts wissen’: Wissen und Verleugnung von sexualisierter Gewalt in Kleists Die Marquise von O… und Starks Film Julietta �” Heinrich von Kleist: Style and Concept: Explorations of Literary Dissonance � Ed. Dieter Sevin and Christoph Zeller. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2013. 363-78. McAllister, Grant Profant� Kleist’s Female Leading Characters and the Subversion of Idealist Discourse � New York: Peter Lang, 2005� McGlathery, James M� Mysticism and Sexuality: E. T. A. Hoffmann. Part Two: Interpretations of the Tales � New York: Peter Lang, 1985� Montaigne, Michel. “De L’Yvrongnerie.” Essais. Vol� 2� Ed� Maurice Rat� Paris: Garnier, 1958. 9-19. Ovid� Metamorphoses � Vol 2� Ed� and trans� Frank Justus Miller� Cambridge: Harvard UP , 1976� Paulin, Roger. “Kleist’s Metamorphoses. Some Remarks on the Use of Mythology in Penthesilea �” Oxford German Studies 14 (1983): 35-53. Połczyńska, Edyta. “Das Polenbild im ‘Gelübde’ von E. T. A. Hoffmann.” Studia Germanica Posnaniensia 17-18 (1991): 147-59. Rohde, Markus. “Zum kritischen Polenbild in E. T. A. Hoffmanns Das Gelübde �” E. T. A. Hoffmann Jahrbuch 9 (2001): 34-41. Sembdner, Helmut, ed� Heinrich von Kleist: Sämtliche Werke und Briefe � Vol� 2� Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2001 Steinecke, Hartmut, ed� E. T. A. Hoffmann: Sämtliche Werke in sechs Bänden � Vol 3� Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985� Thomas, Ursula� “Heinrich von Kleist and Gotthilf Heinrich Schubert�” Monatshefte 51 (1959): 249-61. Weineck, Silke-Maria. The Tragedy of Fatherhood: King Laius and the Politics of Paternity in the West � New York: Bloomsbury, 2014� 68 Eleanor ter Horst Weiss, Hermann F. “Precarious Idylls. The Relationship Between Father and Daughter in Heinrich von Kleist’s Die Marquise von O …�” MLN 91.3 (1976): 538-42. Weitin, Thomas. “Nachtstücke (1816 / 17).” E. T. A. Hoffmann: Leben - Werk - Wirkung � Ed. Detlef Kremer. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012. 161-68. Winnett, Susan. “The Marquise’s ‘O’ and the Mad Dash of Narrative.” Rape and Representation � Ed� Lynn A� Higgins and Brenda R� Silver� New York: Columbia UP , 1993� 67-86. Wright, Elizabeth. E. T. A. Hoffmann and the Rhetoric of Terror: Aspects of Language Used for the Evocation of Fear � London: Institute of Germanic Studies, 1978� The Ballad and its Families - Christina Rossetti, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Friedrich Hebbel and the Anti-Balladry of Sisterhood Adrian Daub Stanford University Abstract: During the nineteenth century the ballad was understood in hereditary terms: it was a tradition passed down from generation to generation, its authority rested on its supposedly oral ancestry, and it, like the fairy tale, tended to tell of families in disarray that had to be brought back into line� This association of poetic form and family politics made sisterhood a useful topic for ballads that wanted to critique and interrogate the ideology of the ballad. Through detailed readings of Christina Rosetti’s Goblin Market , Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s balladry and Friedrich Hebbel’s family ballads, this article traces how sisterhood allowed for a kind of anti-balladry - poems that looked and sounded like ballads, but that undercut the ballad’s claim to represent popular knowledge, oral culture, and the ancestry of the Volk � Keywords: ballad, sisterhood, form, tradition, descent Putting children to bed with song or story is a practice as old as parenting itself, but the nineteenth century obsessively analyzed and sought to structure that quotidian transaction - from Grimm’s Hausmärchen to Proust’s bedtime vigils, from Heinrich von Ofterdingen’s dreams to Freud’s Wolf-Man. In the oedipal age, the question of how lessons, stories, Geist moved from generation to generation felicitously, and what might disrupt their movement, became the source of immense anxiety� The ballad form was an important technology of transmission� Since ballads have implicit narrators, ballads tend towards monovocality of a very different kind than, say, lyric poetry. Where the lyric places a single subjectivity at the origin of poetic locution, the ballad puts a single epistemic unit� The story exists to convey information rather than feeling, and when the story is re-told, it is re-told for information� 70 Adrian Daub Insofar as it participated in intergenerational transmission, the ballad intervened in childhood development later than the nursery rhyme, picture book, or fairy tale� Ballads were a thing of elementary school Lesebücher , of poetry anthologies given as communion gifts, of learning to read and recite and memorize� By the middle of the nineteenth century, a number of writers used the family scene as a way of disrupting the logic of transmission that made the ballad such a standby in schoolhouses and music recitals� For them the monovocality of the ballad told of the inertia, solidity and force of the family line; and for them challenges to that inertia, disruptions of that force could be lodged in the ballad� This article argues that a balladic poetics of sisterhood functioned as precisely this sort of challenge� These ballads of sisterhood used siblinghood to challenge descent as a mode of ascertaining transmission� They describe a sisterhood that seems to exist at the exclusion of intergenerational family structures: sisters are ballad-subjects because they have no mother� This is not an innocent omission� As Friedrich Kittler has argued, “the construct of the originary text, which has no basis in the real, can be possible only through a parasitic relation to the Mother’s Mouth.” (Kittler 86) By absenting the mother these ballads create deeply questionable narratives either unwilling to construct an “originary text” of the kind Kittler describes, or flagrantly obvious in the construction. 1. The Ballad and the Missing Mother Perhaps the clearest reflection of this dynamic comes in a poem outside of the German tradition, and a poem that is not immediately recognizable as a ballad� Christina Rossetti wrote “Goblin Market” in 1859 and published it in 1862� Its story certainly qualifies as balladic: two sisters, Lizzie and Laura, live by themselves in the woods, Laura is tempted by the Goblins who each evening proffer their wares across the glen� Quickly she becomes addicted to their fruit, and returns to the glen each night. After she can no longer afford her addiction, and slowly begins to age and wither away, Lizzie tries to buy the fruit for her� When the Goblins realize she is buying for her sister, they set upon her and try to force-feed her their fruit� Lizzie escapes, and tells her sister to drink the fruit juice off her body. Repulsed by the fruit, Laura falls into a deep sleep, but wakes up cured� It is a story of redemption that would not be out of place in a German ballad of the same era - but Rossetti’s telling of it doesn’t quite fit the mold. The meter is irregular, and varies between three and four stresses; the rhymes vary between simple ABAB couplets and far more outré schemes, the internal rhymes and assonance give the poem the structure of a nursery rhyme� At 567 lines, it goes The Ballad and its Families 71 on far too long to tell a properly balladic story, indulges in fanciful lists and digressions, and foregoes any metafictional markers that would give it an air of minstrelsy� None of these generic markers need to be determinative, of course, and “Goblin Market” is balladic enough, a just-so ballad� As a consequence, its nineteenth-century readers oscillated on what genre to ascribe to the poem, and, by extension, who they believed the poem was for� In an 1863 article on the poem in MacMillan’s Magazine “the Hon� Mrs� Norton” (Caroline Norton), suggests that readers “not too rigorously inquire,” and identifies “Goblin Market” as “a ballad which children will con with delight, and which riper minds may ponder over, as we do with poems written in a foreign language which we only half understand” (Norton 402). The poem’s dual address is a moment of intergenerational transmission: parents and their children read or hear the same verses, but each party hears or reads quite different things. This may well be why Mrs. Norton identifies “Goblin Market” as a ballad: ballads frequently are intergenerational communications� A more experienced speaker initiates the younger listener into certain wisdoms and moral precepts� Ballads are lessons for a time before there are lessons; like fairy tales they may teach something without the pupil noticing it� To be sure: there is no indication that just because “Goblin Market” has a didactic angle, it was therefore read by parents or caregivers to the children under their tutelage. But the poem’s assonance and sound-painting, its seductive lilt and cheeky internal echoes, nevertheless speak of the maternal body, speak of it moreover at the moment at which it begins to recede into the distance� The poem’s viscous, “sugar-sweet” sap are its gorgeous sonorities that can almost be better enjoyed without fully understanding the words: “and whisper’d like the restless brook: / ‘Look, Lizzie, look, Lizzie, / Down the glen tramp little men.’” By contrast, the poem’s villainous, seductive Goblins are masters of signing: where the sisters Laura and Lizzie lie self-sufficiently in each other’s arms, the Goblins we meet are “signalling each other, / Brother with sly brother�” Their seduction is to some extent the seduction of signification, the pull of the Symbolic. The somatic pull of the poem’s sonority, by contrast, which draws the sisters back towards each other with dreamlike ease, emerges from what Julia Kristeva has called the “semiotic�” As Judith Butler has put it, “on its semiotic mode, language [for Kristeva] is engaged in a poetic recovery of the maternal body, that diffuse materiality that resists all discrete and univocal signification.” (Butler 112). Kristeva’s “revolution” in poetic language attaches to the rhythm, rhyme and homophony - all the sense that we can make without attending to the meanings of the words themselves (Kristeva 179). Perhaps this is the existential note behind Mrs. Norton’s puzzlement as to where the meaning of “Goblin Market” is to be located: we can imagine a child- 72 Adrian Daub like hearing of the poem, and a highly suspicious hearing (or more likely reading) of it, but neither mother nor child can clearly locate themselves along the spectrum between the extremes. How much does the child understand? Which fruits prompted the mother to reach for the book? Which will the child feast on, the extravagance of lines like “She suck’d and suck’d and suck’d the more,” or the measured life-lessons like “twilight is not good for maidens”? Christina Rossetti’s most famous collection of nursery rhymes puts that question right in its title: the volume is called Sing Song . Here the mother’s body is an explicit subject, in the dual sense that a lot of the rhymes talk of parents and that many of them are meant to be enunciated by parents� Often enough the rhymes and rhythms that assure the child of the present parents articulate the possible absence: My baby has a father and a mother, Rich little baby! Fatherless, motherless, I know another Forlorn as may be: Poor little baby! (Rossetti 3) Likewise, if the retreat of the maternal body structures the prosody of “Goblin Market,” we cannot ignore that its disappearance triggers the events told in the poem, and its return vouches for the safe deliverance from those events� For Laura and Lizzie appear close to the point of incest, and their world seems almost perfectly self-enclosed; we never hear of parents, an extended family, and until the very end nothing of children (Welter 138). Unperturbed by reproductive sexuality the two sisters live “cheek to cheek and breast to breast / Lock’d together in one nest�” And we get a sense that they may remain unperturbed until Laura’s curiosity, and her expeditions into the forest, bring change into their idyll� There is something intensely seductive, even utopian, in “Goblin Market,” but it is noticeable that this utopia isn’t exactly stable. For Jill Rappoport, “Goblin Market” tells the story of domestic femininity disrupted by the lure of consumerism (the open market) (Rappoport 92). The sisters’ domestic arrangement is always already under threat, and Lizzie’s recue mission cannot remove that threat. Only leaving the idyll in a different direction, namely the transition from sisterhood to motherhood brings the narrative to a definitive close. Of course, if Mrs� Norton is right, it is probably through this generation of a moral out of a story that Goblin Market enters the realm of balladry. While the poem lingers with the fruits and forests and remains occupied with its lilting, dreamy lists, it is far closer to a nursery rhyme� Once it reveals itself, or reinvents itself as a didactic poem, it is much more clearly a ballad: the point of the The Ballad and its Families 73 story is no longer the pleasure of the telling, but rather something to be refined from it, like sugar from its fruits� In more than one way balladry speaks by means of tradition: mother had an ulterior motive for telling you this story� She coated it in just enough rhythmic sugar, but by the end you can taste the medicine� Balladry is the act of passing something on, its voice is that of the forebears and we have absorbed their wisdom long before we can say to ourselves, like little Marcel, “I am falling asleep�” And yet balladry has also resisted this patrilineal, or matrilineal, or any lineal thrust - it has picked up the slack where, as in the case of Rossetti’s “poor little baby,” there is no father or no mother to give voice to the past and to impose it on the future: Days, weeks, months, years Afterwards, when both were wives With children of their own; Their mother-hearts beset with fears, Their lives bound up in tender lives; Laura would call the little ones And tell them of her early prime, Those pleasant days long gone Of not-returning time: (Rosetti 8) In these final stanzas sisterly self-containment gives way to an extension in time, and sisterhood, with all its mysterious glories becomes a teaching: how to be a mother (Casey 70): “For there is no friend like a sister In calm or stormy weather; To cheer one on the tedious way, To fetch one if one goes astray, To lift one if one totters down, To strengthen whilst one stands.” (Rossetti 8) These final lines turn the story into a message, we get a reassuring sense of why it is being told and what moral it is meant to impart� Story turns into teaching; and the sisters turn into mothers, in what appears to be a parallel process. Sisterhood becomes a story to be told to one’s children, a steadying moral to be imparted, when before it behaved more like a destabilizing, disquieting force� Siblinghood becomes, in other words, a mere buttress in intergenerational transmission. The verticality that was missing from the sisters’ mysterious dyad now drafts this very mystery into its service� At the same time, the pleasure of communication from body to body becomes mediated through discourse - it 74 Adrian Daub loses its beautiful, luxuriating pointlessness, leaves behind the nursery and enters the stultifying atmosphere of the classroom� Friedrich Hebbel appears to have completed “Vater und Sohn” the same year Christine Rossetti published “Goblin Market�” And in completing it, he appears to have responded to similar pressures as the didactic, or perhaps more precisely “balladic,” ending Rossetti gave “Goblin Market�” In a diary entry from October 1862, Hebbel notes that he removed a stanza from “the ballad,” which most scholars believe must have referred to “Vater und Sohn”(Hebbel, Tagebücher 4: 343). If that’s true, Hebbel’s lapidary note hides a rather revolutionary intervention into his poem: for the lines Hebbel removed (and which he notes in his diary) belong to a narrator, who comments on and explains the characters’ psychology� The poem we have today has some rudimentary descriptive narration, but is largely made up of dialogue - and much of the poem’s capacity to disturb comes from this willingness to let the characters’ discourse dominate the story. What is lost when one narrates family from the outside? The final stanza of “Goblin Market” provides a suggestion: it risks turning the vagaries of emotional life into a lesson to be imparted; it risks turning family into a standing reserve for melodramatic convention; it risks turning the nursery rhyme into a ballad. Where “Goblin Market” winds up capitulating to this balladic demand, Friedrich Hebbel and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff both experiment with ballads that problematize the narrative, the melodramatic, the dynastic dimensions of family� In doing so, they problematize the notion of tradition itself, for which and of which the ballad cannot help but speak� 2. Balladic Inheritance At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the poet George Borrow posited that the ballad is a “compressed epic.” Goethe’s famous Urei -remark, which proposes that the ballad is the larval form of the dramatic, poetic and epic arts, similarly seems to understand the ballad as a result of compaction� The thematic compression and formal precision of the ballad came to vouch for its connection to the Volk and oral traditions� Throughout the nineteenth century, this compression was often understood in terms of tidiness� Unlike the lumbering epic or the jagged novel, the ballad condensed and domesticated the great wide world. It was an efficient housekeeper, requiring little foreknowledge and little afterthought. Frequently, as articulated most clearly in Franz Lucas’s 1906 dissertation on the topic, Droste-Hülshoff’s Kleinepik is understood in terms of its “art-economic purposes [ kunstökonomischen Zwecken ]” (Lucas 32) - linking the form to the oikos � The Ballad and its Families 75 But in fact Droste-Hülshoff’s domestic scenes used the form’s compression to play off the epic, dramatic and poetic against each other in ingenious ways. And they seem to have done so to complicate the popular perception of ballads, specifically the valorization of oral transmission that lies implicit in the form. Others proceeded the same way: telling stories about the family to talk about the nature of orality, of tradition, of Geist . Droste-Hülshoff’s and Friedrich Hebbel’s balladry critiqued the tendency to understand the process by which Volksballaden survived in a population in essentially familial terms� Both poets treat family relationships as concerned with transmission (of affect, of knowledge, of identity), and understand this transmission as somehow interrelated with the transmission effected in and through the ballad. They reflect on the bonding and restrictive force of family and analogize it with the bonding and restrictive force of poetic form� In terms of its form, the ballad pretends not to have been invented� Like an heirloom of which no one can say exactly when it came into the family, it is handed down and passed on, and if its origins are supposed to be murky, the line and lineage it traces in the process of its transmission is supposed to be deeply meaningful� Ballads belong to national families and what speaks through them was understood to matter differently to the individual depending on whether they belonged to that national family or did not� In this, it strikingly resembled other kinds of inheritance the nineteenth century worried about: what, in a society increasingly dominated by bourgeois values, was the role of hereditary and traditional roles, fiefdoms and privileges? How much freedom did the individual organism have before the will of the species, the drift of its genetic material, its familial or national unconscious? The question of whether transmitting one’s individual will to future generations through testaments was a practice to be encouraged was hotly debated during the time. Broadly speaking, proponents of positive law (for instance Savigny) emphasized the importance of inheritance and inherited will, while natural law theorists tended to regard it as problematic and hubristic to want to project one’s own will past one’s own death - among the latter camp numbered Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s favorite cousin, Clemens August. In his Lehrbuch des Naturrechts oder der Rechtsphilosophie , he writes that “der Wille des Verstorbenen ist ein Grund, welchen […] niemand zu achten hat” (Droste Hülshoff 105; par. 55). Droste-Hülshoff understood herself as someone who would live on through future legacy rather than contemporary presence� In fact, she famously insisted that she did not care to have a contemporary reception: “Aber nach hundert Jahren möchte ich gelesen werden” (Droste-Hülshoff to Elise Rüdiger, July 24, 1843; cited in Sichelschmidt 256)� Inheritance, legacy and transmission would 76 Adrian Daub seem to have mattered to her quite intensely, and yet she was all too aware of the risks and strictures of such acts of bequeathing� The ballad “Vorgeschichte (Second Sight)” from 1840 / 41 picks up on this problematic of transmission: how does one impose one’s will into the distant future? And how does one deal with the past’s will reaching out into one’s own present? A Freiherr finds himself awake at night, worrying about his son, a sickly child who is the last scion of an illustrious family line� Each night he puts the boy to sleep before an immense, looming family tree “schier ohne End’”: Hat er des Kleinen Stammbaum doch Gestellt an des Lagers Ende, Nach dem Abendkusse und Segen noch Drüber brünstig zu falten die Hände; Im Monde flimmernd das Pergament Zeigt Schild an Schilder, schier ohne End‘� Eventually the Freiherr has a vision of a funeral, only to realize he is seeing his own. But the mystical vision of how powerless he is before his family’s ultimate demise leads to a moment of empowerment, an empowerment (not insignificantly for a supposedly originally oral form) through writing: “Dann hat er die Lampe still entfacht, / Und schreibt sein Testament in der Nacht�” As Ulrike Vedder writes, the poem strongly links “Sehergabe und Genealogie” (41). In “Vorgeschichte” it is a matter of a particular kind of sight, but more generally in Droste-Hülshoff we could speak of a connection between genealogy and visibility. What stories are recorded, passed on, or even tellable in the first place, has to do with genealogical and familial structures� But what Vedder does not specifically thematize is the poem’s form itself: the ballad, which manages to combine the family tree (with “Schild an Schilder, schier ohne End’”) with the premonition that inspires the writing of a will. The poem is about an ambient sense (“welch ein Gewimmel! - er muß es sehn, / Ein Gemurmel! - er muß es hören”) that eventually inspires a very precise genre of written transmission. Not only does Droste-Hülshoff’s ballad seem to contain a theory of family inheritance, it seems to allegorize the origin myth of the form of the Kunstballade itself: it transforms an uncertain, visionary, sensuous form of transmission into a carefully regulated (and written) form. It is, however, to put it mildly, an ambivalent allegory� Certainly, “Vorgeschichte (Second Sight)” is not a celebration of genealogy - if anything, the Freiherr and the weak young boy he frets over, suffer from an overabundance of past� In many ballads, balladic knowledge presents a kind of heterodox history-writing, compensating for the defects of the “official” version. In “Vorgeschichte,” by contrast, the ballad records something not being recorded, transmits The Ballad and its Families 77 something that cannot and will not be transmitted� The Freiherr ’s ghostly vision of his own death will pass down to no one; his last will and testament does� What families transmit from generation to generation emerges as a problem analogous to what the ballad transmits and how� Droste-Hülshoff’s “Die Schwestern” deals with a single generation: quite like “Goblin Market” it constructs a story of sisterhood at the exclusion of parents and children� Unlike “Goblin Market,” it foregrounds the question of who exactly is doing the constructing� “Die Schwestern” tells the story of Gertrude and Helene. In the first part, Helene has not returned from an errand in town and a half-mad Gertrude rushes madly through the forest searching for her� The second part tells of what may have been a missed encounter in town years later. In the third part, Gertrude finally finds her sister’s corpse washed up at the shore - Helene, apparently a well-known prostitute, has drowned� In the fourth part we learn that Helene’s death drove Gertrude into madness and eventual suicide; she is said to haunt the grove where the narrator, an aristocratic hunter traveling with his Bursche , comes to stalk his prey� Or at least, that is the story the reader is eventually led toward� For Droste- Hülshoff’s poem largely mimics Gertrude’s cognitive processes - her desperate, confused attempts to bring into some sort of order a mad, incomprehensible rush of events, which are mimicked in the poem’s breathless and episodic narration� But this desire for order is double-edged: like Gertrude, the reader is invited to construct meaning and coherence, and seduced into forgetting that these are constructions. Especially when the poem’s narrator finally enters the scene, the question of what, if any, legitimacy these shopworn narrative constructions possess is thrust to the forefront of the poem� “Die Schwestern” is rife with melodramatic plot points, but again and again the reader is led to doubt that those plots accurately describe what is going on� The poem is rife, even overripe, with Gothic and melodramatic trappings, from rocky outcroppings to dark forests. In the first section of the poem a group of Knechte at the local mill listen to the “irre Gespenst im Tanne,” a ghost that turns out to be Gertrude - very much alive, very much sane, and very much in need of their aid� She will end up mad and a ghost, of course, but at this moment Gertrude is simply a desperate woman in a desperate situation� It is a male gaze, as secure as it is blinkered, that turns her into a trope, and thus into a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is, indeed, worth noting that to claim, as I have just done, that in the end Gertrude will conform to their melodramatic projection, that is to say will wind up both crazy and spectral, means to once again credit a male gaze with an objectivity that elsewhere in the poem it manifestly does not possess� It is a gaggle of male sailors who identify dead Helene (bulging with lake water) as a local 78 Adrian Daub prostitute; it is our male narrator who claims that Gertrude went mad, and who claims that she haunts these woods. Why would we believe them? It is easy to think of “Die Schwestern” as a story of a family undone by the disappearance of paternal authority - Helene has been entrusted to Gertrude by her dying mother, and while there is no father in the picture, Gertrude early on invokes “Vater unser.” Neither real nor spiritual parents offer succor to the sisters and so their sisterhood comes to naught� But this, too, appears to be an interpretation of the facts, rather than a fact in its own right� The paternalistic reading of “Die Schwestern” constitutes itself a paternalistic imposition of meaning on facts that may well not support it� The most important projection, however, has long slipped past us by the time we become suspicious� It is almost at the end of this lengthy poem that the narrator makes the somewhat startling admission that “Die Schwestern” of the title may be anything but. Why did one break down at the sight of the other’s corpse? The reader has been led to assume that their connection is somehow established or explained, but it turns out their relationship lingers only as a suspicion: “Ob ihres Blutes? man wußte es nicht! / Kein Fragen löste das Schweigen. The ballad can do what no “Fragen” is able to accomplish: it fills the silence that surrounds, that in some sense constitutes the sisters’ sisterhood. That would put “Die Schwestern” in a whole class of nineteenth-century poems that celebrate poetry’s ability to speak for things that the prose of the world has no access to, such as the nocturnal vision behind the prosaic writing of the will in “Vorgeschichte�” But that would require that the narrator knows more than the “man” who doesn’t know whether Gertrude and Helene are sisters. In “Vorgeschichte” this seems likely: omniscient balladic narration transcends both the objective account of family (the family tree and the will) and the subjective experience of it. But in “Die Schwestern,” Droste-Hülshoff pointedly refuses this gesture: at the very moment when poetry as such could take over for embodied narration, she instead insists on filling us in on who is narrating, and who has been narrating all along. Who then is narrating the poem and how does he know the story, specifically how does he know the sisters are sisters? This situation foregrounds the problem of narrative technique in Droste- Hülshoff’s ballad more generally: We could decide that the title knows something that the poem does not. Could it be that the different parts of the poem are focalized through a polyphony of poetic speakers? This would seem to violate important formal requirements in a poem, which tend to ask us to suppose a single speaking subjectivity behind the poetic speech� And in the case of the ballad, there is an additional contextual requirement: We are supposed to be able to imagine a lone bard, ancient minstrel, or a carnival barker telling the story, which means it has to be focalized through a personalized voice� “Die Schwest- The Ballad and its Families 79 ern” foregrounds this problem by actually staging the scene of performance: the second part begins with a market day in town, with town criers, a hurdygurdy man, and even a Hanswurst � This is, in other words, the world into which the ballad imaginatively inserts itself, of which it pretends to be a surviving sediment. The poem reminds us poetologically: ’My genre tells you that I am supposed to issue from a specific situation; I am to be imagined emitting from a specific speaker and to be received by a situated audience.’ The narrator of “Die Schwestern” is, if anything, far more intrusive than is necessary for a ballad� The identical opening and closing lines, statements like “mich dünkt, wir müssen sie kennen,” foreground the fact that here one person is speaking to another person, or more likely persons, and that both groups remain identical from stanza to stanza. When the narrator does appear in the poem, he does so with far more dramatic definition than the usual ballad-speaker: he is a he, for one, since we meet him hunting with a rifle; he is wealthy, wealthy enough to have a manservant, and he is from the same area as the sisters� This raises the problem of how this person can know what he knows. Why does he narrate what he narrates? Is sisterhood his creation? The poem asks about knowing at the end: how did “man” know these two women are sisters? How do the poem’s speaker and the poem’s audience know this? The answer seems to be: the poem has worked quite hard to manufacture that impression� Even the moment of recognition, Gertrude leaning over the dead Helene, is engineered for the benefit of an outside gaze (“ Als habe sie etwas gefunden”), and is engineered by poetic language itself: the third section of the ballad begins with a prolonged, and rather forced, reflection on eyes, then moves on to describe the “Leich mit dem Auge des Stieres,” and then has that gaze transmit itself to Gertrude (“so stier und bohrend verweht ihr Blick”). In no case is the recourse to eyes truly necessary, none of these metaphors sit very comfortably in this section� Our balladic narrator is manipulating the dials, creating echoes where properly there are none, and Droste-Hülshoff is careful to have him leave fingerprints doing so. But if knowledge is always at the intersection of projection and datum, where does sisterhood fall? What sort of knowledge is it and what sort of knowledge (or gaze) produces it? If the poem simply posits it, why does it posit it at all? It would be easy to read the ballad as salvaging what the world of men doesn’t and cannot know - namely that Gertrude and Helene are long-separated sisters� But the gendered emphasis on gazing and knowledge makes it clear that sisterhood may well be a male projection - two women come to die in horrible but predictable ways, and a male gaze constructs the melodramatic structure around their deaths� 80 Adrian Daub Why is this projection necessary? Is it simply that melodrama makes for good, morbid entertainment for a wealthy hunter and others like him? The poem doesn’t say, but its paratextual arrangements (title, section breaks, etc.) suggest that constructing the sisterhood-narrative matters immensely to the poem. It needs this to be true, even if it perhaps isn’t. It’s easy to say that the ballad form speaks for the dispossessed, for those who don’t usually get to narrate their own stories (the apprentice rather than the sorcerer), but “Die Schwestern” submits the ballad’s Standesklausel to rather strenuous scrutiny� Just as plausible as the reading that the poem protects a heterodox counter-history is the reading that the poem imposes a masculinist fantasy of common tropes on the relationship between two women� This ambiguity in how we are to interpret the poem’s very telling of its story places particular emphasis on the repeated line that opens and closes the poem� It is a bit of Naturlyrik and first describes the scene of Helene’s disappearance and concludes the poem by depicting the desolate landscape that inspires the narrator to comprehend (or invent) the earlier scene: “Sacht pochet der Käfer im morschen Schrein, / Der Mond steht über den Fichten�” The poem ends with its own inspiration� And the nature of this inspiration is precisely the question: is nature suggesting something to our narrator, something that society has perhaps repressed? Or does nature simply function here as the instigator for a melodramatic flight of fancy? This tethers the specific question of what it means that the line is repeated in each of the poem’s two worlds to another, much broader one: What does it mean that ballads are repeated? Friedrich Hebbel raises just this question in the ballad “Vater und Sohn�” For decades the ballad form had contained the dream of a story handed down from generation to generation, passed along orally without ever requiring the brittle supplement of the printed page. Hebbel’s ballad presents that fantasy as a nightmare: he presents a shadow of violence, guilt and madness being handed from generation to generation. The ballad form recapitulates (and in a climactic moment of possible salvation comes to disrupt) a familial form of inheritance� 3. The Weight of History On October 8, 1862, Hebbel jots down a quick anecdote in his diary� It is about an ekphrastic rather than narrative poem, but a poem that likewise deals with family. His fifteen-year-old daughter Christine, also known as “Titi,” recites his poem “Drei Schwestern�” He writes that “Ich ahnte nicht, daß sie es auswendig weiß�” Hebbel then relates the following episode: The Ballad and its Families 81 Als sie an die Stelle kommt: ‘Sie weiß noch kaum, daß sie ein Mädchen ist’, versteckt sie sich hinter ihrer Mutter und fängt herzlich zu lachen an� Ich dachte, sie fühle den Bezug auf sich selbst und verrathe das naiver Weise durch ihr Lachen; es war aber das Ergebnis einer noch größeren Naivetät, sie fand den Vers doch gar zu dumm, denn ‘daß sie ein Mädchen sey, werde die Jüngste doch wohl wissen’. ( Tagebücher 223) The poem in question is a description of Palma Vecchio’s painting of three sisters. It, like Droste-Hülshoff’s “Die Schwestern,” is a poem about the mysteries of sisterhood. But unlike Droste-Hülshoff, and perhaps not unlike her narrator, Hebbel fills in the mysteries by overinterpreting. Palma Vecchio’s painting is subtle, and while it is strange to treat a poem like a piece of art criticism, the poem almost asks its readers to do so: how much of the poem’s psychological detail, how much of its life philosophy, how much of its moralizing, can we really make out in Palma Vecchio’s painting? Der einen zuckt es schmerzlich um den Mund, Sie trug den Kranz der Schönheit, voll und rund, Doch glitt er schneller, als sie’s je geglaubt, Hinüber auf der Nächsten schlichtes Haupt, Und still empfindet sie die Macht der Zeit Im ersten Schauer der Vergänglichkeit� Hebbel opens the poem by acknowledging that every emotion ascribed to the three young women is in fact a male projection, and a projection born out of a kind of paternalistic impulse� For the story the painting tells the poetic I - that the three girls are starting to cope with adulthood, with the inevitable fading of youth - is an emphatically sentimental one� The three girls are being described in all the physical expressions of naiveté popular at mid-century: Drei Schwestern sind’s, von sanftem Reiz umstrahlt, Ihr eigner Vater hat sie uns gemalt, Sich ähnlich an Gestalt und an Gesicht, Sogar an Augen, nur an Mienen nicht, Und lieblicher hab’ ich den Horentanz Noch nie erblickt in seinem Zauberglanz� Note that Hebbel ascribes to his own daughter a similar naiveté: He is surprised she knows the poem and misunderstands her amusement� His sentimental pleasure at her naïve acceptance of her father’s description of a young girl’s fate is deeply paternalistic. And yet, there is more going on in Hebbel’s little note: For ironically, young Christine actually rewrites her father’s poem. At least the published version renders the line in question as: “Die dritte hat noch eine lange 82 Adrian Daub Frist, / Sie weiß noch kaum, daß sie kein Kind mehr ist�” Young Christine turns that into “Sie weiß noch kaum, daß sie ein Mädchen ist�” Given the age of the three women Palma Vecchio depicts, this would indeed be surprising. But perhaps that isn’t the motivation of Christine’s, conscious or unconscious, reworking of her father’s line. She ascribes to the youngest of the three women a degree of naïve grace that transcends the bounds of common sense: and she turns a story of aging and maturation seemingly accidentally focused on three women, into a story about gender� She exaggerates the extent to which these women mean only insofar as men force them to mean, either by pictorial or poetic means� And given that Palma Vecchio imposes meaning on his daughters, and “Titi” recites a poem by her father, the little episode seems to speak to the role of paternal imposition in art: how fathers force their offspring to realize meaning they have imposed on them� This is an abiding fascination of Hebbel’s balladry as well, to the point that ballads may be seen as inheritances of just the kind that Hebbel’s fathers force upon their reluctant offspring. “Vater und Sohn” is perhaps most blunt in making this link, but many of the poems collected in Hebbel’s Ausgabe Letzter Hand under the rubric “Balladen und Verwandtes” treat the passing-on that happens in ballads and the passing-on of (often undesirable) familial traits as analogous. In the poem “Aus der Kindheit,” for instance, another largely dialogue-based ballad, a mother (at the behest of an absent father) forces her son to drown the family cat, and almost ends up killing him in the bargain� Just like Droste-Hülshoff, Hebbel worries about what such passing on leaves out - unlike her, it is not with the intention of transmitting new stories from new speakers, but instead with a view to escaping from the suffocating strictures of having to transmit� “Vater und Sohn” tells a straightforward story, a gothic whodunit of sorts, but in so doing manages to reflect on and trouble the very lucidity of the story and its telling. Whatever it makes clear it indicts; and whatever it manages to make murky it tends to regard as a source of hope� A grandfather has made his grandson set fire to their house, and his son decides to put an end to the old man (“so steck ich dir heut das Ziel”) and thereby to his deviltry� This is presumably to protect the boy from following in the grandfather’s footsteps, although it turns out the father himself is following in his father’s footsteps: repeating his father’s patricide with his own father. The poem outlines a lineage consisting not just of the three generations that interact in the poem proper, but also of past and future generations� But the poem’s central gesture, that of inheritance from father to son, confuses its meaning more than it clarifies it. The poem is called “Vater und Sohn,” but the poem is really talking about three different relationships that can be characterized in that way: the grandfather and the father he slew, the grandfather and the father The Ballad and its Families 83 who wants to kill him, and lastly the father and the son who may be next in the parricidal line, but who is, as of the time of narration, simply a mute onlooker� The poem’s first stanza is all about the fire, which the little boy has set, but his father correctly surmises that this was at his grandfather’s instructions. Knowledge moves through the patriarchal line, it, like murderous madness, is an acquired trait that is passed down the family tree, as though on the Y-chromosome� “Wer hat die Kerze ins Dach gesteckt? ” Mein Sohn, dein Knabe tat’s! “Mein Arm ist zu kurz, wie hoch er ihn reckt! ” Ich hob ihn empor, er erbat’s. The story the ballad tells is concerned with the transmission of knowledge from one generation to the next: the father has witnessed his grandfather’s murder, and he is about to visit the same fate upon his father� Wer fault denn dort? “Mein Vater, Sohn, Schau, eben zeigt er sich! ” Wem droht der Schatten? “Wem sollt er drohn? Dem Mörder, und das bin ich! ” The realization that his son might see the same, which may beget an identical development down the generations, eventually stays his hand� Der Mond ergießt sein blaues Licht Durch eine Wolke schwach, Es trifft ein blasses Kindergesicht, Das Knäblein schlich sich nach� But the patrilinear relationship that so uncannily transmits knowledge in the poem’s story comes to undercut it in its form. That’s because the poem deliberately compounds generations upon each other, and insists on narrative repetition so obsessively that it is often hard to parse which father does what to which son at any one point. The poem delights in maneuvering different relations into adjacent positions, usually through apostrophe and repetition: “Mein Sohn, dein Knabe tat’s,” “Mein Vater, Sohn,” “Mein Sohn, mein Sohn, nicht dorthinein.” What moves the strange carousel of appellations in Hebbel’s ballad is the linguistic fact that “father” and “son” are sliding signifiers, that, in other words, everyone has a father, but that the locution “my father” only rarely means the same person in two instances. This slide works only because of the poem’s determinism; that is the fact that we cannot distinguish the various fathers and sons by their actions, because they all behave (at least at first) the same way. 84 Adrian Daub What complicates matters further is the use of quotation marks throughout. These aren’t strictly necessary in ballads, many were printed entirely without them in the nineteenth century. Hebbel includes them to offset the different dialogue partners (one person speaking in quotation marks, the other speaking in the same Schriftbild as the poem’s narrator), but in a way that again confuses rather than clarifies who is speaking. Sometimes the father’s discourse is marked by quotes and the son’s is presented as just plain poem-text, at others the reverse is true. And again, it is very difficult to determine who is screaming bloody murder, since both candidates are interchangeable in their murderousness. But the final line, the poem’s moral, brings a final respite from the churn of tainted heritage, as the father offers his father the clemency the older man never extended to his sire: “Steh auf, und steckst du auch morgen mir Die Hütte ganz in Brand, Ich setze den Stuhl in der neuen dir, Der in der alten stand.” ( Sämtliche Werke 1.6: 428-29) Just as in Droste-Hülshoff’s “Vorgeschichte,” the poem thus plays with a juxtaposition between oral tradition and written transmission, and again the poem includes its own materiality in their play. After all, the poem’s penchant for apostrophizing and repetition makes it a very tough poem to read or hear� The poem, which is about acts of oral transmission of knowledge, depends on the written form, above all the magic of the comma, which helps us make at least some sense of who is talking to whom at different moments. Writing down the events gives rise to a kind of civilizing process: fathers and sons no longer wantonly collapse into one another, we are able to prize apart the generations� The comma creates a caesura in the heedless repetition of the previous generations’ crimes and defects� This is a tradition of murder and mayhem that writing does all too well to disrupt� As different as Hebbel’s and Droste-Hülshoff’s poems are, they coincide in this distrust of the patriarchal power of orality� Balladry tends to celebrate the wayward, heterodox and anarchic power of oral literature against the alienation of the written word: it avoids the rarefied realm of high literature and reproduces Volkes Stimme . Hebbel and Droste-Hülshoff were far more suspicious of the oral� They in many respects reverse the value system that had animated balladry during its resurgence in the late eighteenth century: Better to write a testament, to set down a comma, than to just prick up your ears and listen obediently to a poetic heirloom� The written word is less beholden to the inherited prerogative of whoever gets to speak� Volkes Stimme to them spoke not truth to power, but spoke rather power, the power of tradition, the force of habit, the The Ballad and its Families 85 inertia of patriarchy� They are leery of the force of inherited convention and the convention of inheritance� Sisterhood becomes important to the ballad’s family politics as an index of that of which the ballad seems ill-equipped to speak: there is something so private about sisterhood in Rossetti, in Droste-Hülshoff, in Hebbel that it resists transmission without damage. When one speaks it, one speaks it in the language of the father, as pèreversion� For if balladic gestures, like the didactic turn “Goblin Market” takes seemingly almost against its own better judgment, appear to these three poets as part of a tainted heritage, an index of how form prejudices content, this forces them into something of a bind� The reason Christina Rossetti gives her long poem the ending that she does is to be able to transport the lilting, fruit-soaked juice in the allegedly purifying goblet of form� To demand that the ballad speak of that of which it cannot speak, would be to ask it to pull itself out of the bog by its own hair - and that only happens in fairy tales, or perhaps ballads� Works Cited Casey, Janet Galligani. “The Potential of Sisterhood: Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market,” Victorian Poetry 29.1 (1991): 63-78. Droste Hülshoff, Clemens August von. Lehrbuch des Naturrechtes oder der Rechtsphilosophie � Marcus, 1831� Hebbel, Friedrich� Tagebücher � Berlin: Behr, 1904� Hebbel, Friedrich� “Vater und Sohn�” Sämtliche Werke (Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe) � Berlin: Behr, 1904� Kittler, Friedrich� Discourse Networks 1800 / 1900 � Stanford, CA : Stanford UP , 1992� Kristeva, Julia� The Revolution in Poetic Language � New York: Columbia UP , 1984� Lucas, Franz� Zur Balladentechnik der Annette von Droste-Hülshoff � Münster: Regensberg, 1906� Norton, Caroline. “‘An Angel in the House’ and ‘The Goblin Market.’” MacMillan’s Magazine 8 (1863): 398-401. Rappoport, Jill� Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture � Oxford: Oxford UP , 2012� Rossetti, Christina� Sing Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book � New York: Macmillan, 1893� —� The Poetical Works of Christina Georgina Rossetti � New York: Macmillan, 1904� Sichelschmidt, Gustav� Allein mit meinem Zauberwort: Annette von Droste-Hülshoff Droste � Düsseldorf: Droste, 1990� Weigel, Sigrid and Willer, Stefan. Erbe: Übertragungskonzepte zwischen Natur und Kultur � Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2013� Welter, Nancy. “Women Alone: Le Fanu’s ‘Carmilla’ and Rossetti’s ‘Goblin Market.’” Victorian Sensations: Essays on a Scandalous Genre � Ed� Kimberly Harrison and Richard Fantina� Columbus, OH : Ohio State UP , 2006� Blood and Family in Fan Fiction Versions of Classic Folktales 87 “Märchen mal anders”: Blood and Family in Fan Fiction Versions of Classic Folktales Jaime W. Roots University of California, Santa Cruz Abstract: This essay investigates the evolving definition of what it means to be a family member and likewise to be considered an “outsider” in German society by comparing classic Grimm tales with modern-day adaptations in Internet fan fiction. It begins by examining the role of the cruel and tormenting stepsister and stepmother as well as the kind and loving biological sister and brother in the Grimm tales. While the tales emphasize the cruelty of the stepfamily members, they also highlight their foreignness and suggest the corrupting nature of foreign influences. The essay continues arguing that the definition of “family” in Germany is evolving which can be seen in modern fan fiction versions of the same Grimm tales. Fan fiction tales de-emphasize the role of blood kinship and acknowledge personal character as paramount in the definition of “family.” Keywords: fairy tales, folk tales, fan fiction, Grimm, Internet, siblings In Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812-1857), the roles of siblings in nineteenth-century bourgeois Germany were quite clear. While in the Grimms’ collection biological siblings experience a relationship of reciprocal love and compassion, often sacrificing their own happiness or well-being for family members, stepsiblings maintain an antagonistic relationship with their stepfamilies which often ends in death or dismemberment� Tales such as “Hänsel und Gretel,” “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen,” “Aschenputtel,” and “Frau Holle” demonstrate that blood relation is portrayed as necessary to a loving relationship with a sibling and they present stepsiblings as foreign elements introduced into the family disruptive and untrustworthy� Yet as times change, do these familial expectations change with them? Just as the Grimms adapted the tales in their collection for their nineteenth-century German audience, making changes to emphasize the closeness 88 Jaime W. Roots of the biological family as well as the importance of the German cultural heritage, their tales continue to be adapted and changed by others� In the twenty-first century, we have experienced adaptations of the Grimms’ tales through a variety of delivery methods from the written word to the theater, cinema, television, and more recently through Internet fan fiction. In modern interpretations of the tales mentioned above, there is a clear re-evaluation of biological ties as well as indications of writers grappling with questions of foreignness and belonging in society. While the Grimms portray the blood-sibling relationship as paramount, fan fiction versions of the tales de-emphasize the role of blood kinship, often diminishing its significance to the tale itself. Stepsiblings, on the other hand, are either given justification for their apparent evil deeds, or turned into more compassionate figures. This shows that these contemporary writers no longer see blood relation as an absolute marker in determining the closeness of a bond, but rather emphasize personal character� In this essay, I focus on the evolving definition of what it means to be a family member, and likewise to be considered an “outsider,” by comparing classic Grimm tales with their modern-day adaptations in Internet fan fiction on the German site FanFiktion.de. The wicked nature of step relations, specifically stepmothers and stepsisters, is a prominent feature of folktales. In the Grimms’ “Aschenputtel,” the mistreatment of Aschenputtel by her stepsisters is a theme throughout� Here, a short passage from their 1857 edition details the cruelty stepsisters can inflict: “Soll die dumme Gans bei uns in der Stube sitzen? ” sprachen sie. “Wer Brot essen will, muß es verdienen: hinaus mit der Küchenmagd�” Sie nahmen [Aschenputtel] seine schönen Kleider weg, zogen ihm einen grauen alten Kittel an und gaben ihm hölzerne Schuhe� “Seht einmal die stolze Prinzessin, wie sie geputzt ist! ” riefen sie, lachten und führten es in die Küche� […] Obendrein taten ihm die Schwestern alles ersinnliche Herzeleid an […]� Abends, wenn es sich müdegearbeitet hatte, kam es in kein Bett, sondern mußte sich neben den Herd in die Asche legen. (94) With their tormenting behavior, the stepsisters question Aschenputtel’s membership in the family circle by forcing her to live the life of a maid� They mock her and attempt to separate her from the high status she would have enjoyed through her familial connections� Her father is described as a rich man, yet after he remarries, the stepmother and -sisters exclude Aschenputtel from any aspects of family life or those class-related advantages she might otherwise have enjoyed� At the end of the tale, as Aschenputtel has reclaimed her birthright and exceeded her previous social standing by marrying a prince, the stepsisters “wollten sich einschmeicheln und teil an [Aschenputtels] Glück nehmen” (99). Rather than treat her as a loving sister, the stepsisters view Aschenputtel opportunisti- Blood and Family in Fan Fiction Versions of Classic Folktales 89 cally as a means for their own material gain. We are reminded shortly after this scene, however, that this is not how true siblings should act, as the stepsisters are described as “Die falschen Schwestern” (99). And as Aschenputtel marries the prince, the two stepsisters are punished for their actions by having their eyes pecked out by doves as they stand beside Aschenputtel attempting to share in her good fortune� With its emphasis on the “Bosheit” and “Falschheit” (99) of the step-siblings, the tale suggests that biological siblings would not torment one another as Aschenputtel’s stepsisters have. Edited and rewritten by Wilhelm Grimm to be more suitable for children, the Grimms’ collection came to demonstrate clearcut morals so that children could learn societal expectations� Beginning in the 1820s, there was a growing expectation that folktales should be guided towards children� As literature for children, they were expected to not just be entertaining, but also didactic (Zipes 20). In the first edition published in 1812, the story ends with Aschenputtel’s marriage and the stepsisters are not punished. Yet as Wilhelm revised the later editions, he established clear lines of reward for characters who adhere to societal standards and punishment for those who do not� Ironically, by ostracizing Aschenputtel in the tale, the stepsisters ostracize themselves� In their attempts to remove Aschenputtel from the family circle, and distance themselves from her, the stepsisters were instead the figures who separated themselves� This distinction between true and “fake” family members also reflects the desire of many nineteenth-century German intellectuals, including the Grimms, to establish boundaries around what they considered to be German and what was foreign� The stepsisters are “fake” because they have no hereditary ties to Aschenputtel - they are presented as foreign elements in the family by virtue of their status as step siblings� Likewise, stepsisters, as well as stepmothers, are often used in folktales to represent competition and a threat to the traditional family unit as stepsiblings are children whose paternity, or even sometimes maternity, is often not firmly established in the tale (Tatar 32). The Grimms’ tales present no background information on the provenance of these characters, nor is this information important to the tale itself - the stepfamily members are only depicted as a foreign, imposing presence and they are almost always portrayed as disruptive outsiders� The tendency of many German nineteenth-century intellectuals to give distinct definition to what they saw as foreign was strongly influenced by years of French occupation and rule, during which borders within what would later become a unified Germany were continually redrawn. The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 seems to have marked the beginning of an era that promoted the national agenda - and many German states moved to create national histories 90 Jaime W. Roots that denied French involvement in their pasts (Planert 678). From 1815-1830, the historical novel was the most popular genre in German literature as many attempted to grapple with defining a German identity after French occupation (Peterson 287), when Deutschtum was not just ideologically, but also literally under threat� As the century progressed, nationalism was on the rise and it was during the last half of the century especially, that the growing need to identify and defend a distinctly “German” culture was tied to the political will� Throughout the century and in folklore collections especially, intellectuals such as the Grimms, Achim von Arnim, and Clemens Brentano strove to prove that Germany was much more than a geographical location� They often created tension between German culture and foreign influence (Norton 7) and highlighted the hereditary and cultural aspects of what it meant to be German and to be included in that society� The attempt to define what was German manifests in the very careful way in which the Grimms specify the difference between hereditary family members and foreign, stepfamily members� Step-relatives symbolically invade the traditional family and seek to pull it apart - often degrading biological and socially elevated family members such as Aschenputtel in an attempt to raise their own children to become members of the powerful, ruling class. In the Grimms’ tales, this invasion is portrayed as a threat to traditional societal standards and expectations� Characters like Aschenputtel free themselves from the injustices imposed on them by stepfamilies and regain their rightful places in society while the foreign members are destroyed or ostracized� The Grimms’ depiction of familial foreigners was further influenced by the German understanding of Staatsbürgerschaft which was based on cultural, ethnic, and linguistic elements of an individual rather than territorial location (Anil 454). The focus on Staatsbürgerschaft in German society allowed for easy exclusion of anything perceived as foreign and an emphasis on hereditary ties for membership in society - thus there is an emphasis in the folktales of the time on discovering the “falsch” family members and an effort to promote and reward the family members who are somehow “real” - or related by hereditary ties� The foreigner is described as somehow bad or wicked, and the hereditary siblings as kind and true� Another example of the efforts to separate the “real” members of society from the “fake” ones can be found in the Grimms’ version of “Frau Holle,” where the main female character and her stepsister are judged differently by the mother: “Eine Witwe hatte zwei Töchter, davon war die eine schön und fleißig, die andere häßlich und faul� Sie hatte aber die häßliche und faule, weil sie ihre rechte Tochter war, viel lieber” (103). Thus the mother (or stepmother) is described as preferring one to the other according to hereditary criteria� Despite the fact Blood and Family in Fan Fiction Versions of Classic Folktales 91 that her own daughter is ugly and lazy, she prefers her only because she is her biological daughter� Her “real” daughter will be able to carry on the traditions and blood-lines of the mother and the stepdaughter is implicitly shunned as one who will never be able to do so. While “Frau Holle” could be a tale describing the beautiful and hardworking daughter as a foreigner because she is not the widow’s “real” family, the tale very clearly defines the widow as Stiefmutter , and the beautiful, hardworking daughter is never referred to as a Stieftochter � Thus the widow and the ugly, lazy daughter are designated as the foreigners, and the tale highlights the good, noble qualities of the beautiful, hardworking daughter against the laziness and ugliness of foreigners� The beautiful and hardworking girl is presented without mention of either of her parents or biological siblings� Yet the tale makes clear by their very descriptions, that the other two characters must be stepfamily members according to the Grimms’ portrayal of familial relations� The stepmother is described as “unbarmherzig” and the stepsister not only as “häßlich und faul” but also at the end of the tale as “schmutzig” as she is punished for her laziness by being covered with tar - making her outward appearance reveal her inner heart even more dramatically than her ugliness� The faithful and hardworking daughter adheres to the societal standards emphasized in the Grimms’ collection while the step-members who deviate from these standards clearly represent unwanted members of a society that transcends the family� In comparison to the relationships between stepsisters, biological siblings enjoy an entirely different relationship as they are neither foreign nor “falsch.” Two tales, “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen” and “Hänsel und Gretel,” highlight the closeness of the blood-sibling relationship which is detailed in many folktales in the Grimms’ collection. In “Hänsel und Gretel” the following phrase is repeated time and again: “Und Hänsel tröstete sein Schwesterchen” (67). The two siblings, abandoned at the behest of their stepmother and thrust into the evil clutches of a murderous witch, have only each other to rely on and they are each other’s only comfort. After Gretel kills the witch and she and her brother are finally reunited, the following tender reaction occurs: “Sie haben sie sich gefreut, sind sich um den Hals gefallen, sind herumgesprungen und haben sich geküßt! ” (72). The story may now continue to its happy end as the two “real” siblings have been reunited, the stepmother has died, and the lateral biological family unit has been restored� “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen” also focuses on these same themes, yet the relationship between the two siblings is brought even more to the fore - demonstrating a relationship of such total devotion that it is shown as the only means of happiness and fulfillment for the siblings. In this tale, two siblings are lost in a forest while a witch tries to kill them by enchanting every water source 92 Jaime W. Roots the children encounter� If the children drink from the water, they will be transformed into wild beasts and shot by hunters� Schwesterchen is able to sense all of the witch’s enchantments, but at one point she is not able to warn her brother quickly enough� He drinks the water and is transformed into a deer� After his transformation, Schwesterchen weeps but announces, “Sei still, liebes Rehchen, ich will dich ja nimmermehr verlassen” (53), and as the reader discovers at the end of the tale, she remains with him ever after� There are also scenes such as “abends, wenn Schwesterchen müde war, legte es seinen Kopf auf den Rücken des Rehkälbchens, das war sein Kissen, darauf es sanft einschlief� Und hätte das Brüderchen nur seine menschliche Gestalt gehabt, es wäre ein herrliches Leben gewesen” (54). Schwesterchen’s happiness is tied completely to the happiness and well-being of her brother - and theirs is a relationship depicted as one of deep devotion and love� Later, Schwesterchen meets a king and they marry and eventually Brüderchen is changed back to his human form� And while the tale claims that Schwesterchen lived happily with the king and they have their own children, the final line adds: “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen aber lebten glücklich zusammen bis an ihr Ende” (57), asserting the primacy of the blood sibling relationship over exogamy� As the last line of “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen” shows, it is not the love of her husband or children that allows Schwesterchen to live happily ever after, but the love and partnership of her brother - evoking a nearly romantic relationship between the two in order to emphasize their closeness� In the Grimms’ collection, tales such as “Aschenputtel” and “Frau Holle” describe in detail how siblings should not behave� The evil stepsiblings torment the good and pure sister and in the end, are physically branded for their misdeeds whether it be the loss of their eyes as in “Aschenputtel” or being covered in tar in “Frau Holle.” The physical punishment they receive further solidifies their status as outsiders - the consequences of their evil hearts are now visible to all� In contrast, tales like “Hänsel und Gretel” and “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen” show what the love of a biological and true family looks like� They highlight the dedication and loving nature of a “real” sibling relationship� They will risk anything for each other and are only truly able to attain happiness and fulfillment when they remain together. The tales themselves attempt to highlight blood relation as necessary to a loving relationship and show the dangers of outsiders being allowed into the family circle� While the Grimm versions may not necessarily duplicate the oral tradition of folkand fairytales, they do represent a window into the mid-nineteenth century bourgeois conception of familial relations� Hereditary ties are represented as vastly important in familial bonding and love� Stepmothers and -sisters represent something evil, unnatural, and ultimately foreign—an encroachment on Blood and Family in Fan Fiction Versions of Classic Folktales 93 the ideal that the Grimms presented of the traditional family of father, mother, and child who are all related by blood� Yet as societal perception of familial relationships has shifted and changed since the publication of the final edition of the Grimms’ tales in 1857, so, too, have the representations of familial bonds in folktales. A study done by the German Federal Ministry for Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth has found that “the family today has many more facets than in previous times” and that there is a large and growing number of non-married families, single parents, and families made up of several households - or stepfamilies� The study also noted that the traditional family of father, mother, and child living together under one roof is continuing to shrink as two-thirds of all homes in Germany are one-generation households: either single individuals or couples living without children� People in Germany are less likely to stay together as a tight family unit under one roof and children are moving out and away from their parents earlier than previously� The study also found that of households of parents living with children - 45 % were stepfamilies. While in the past a large number of stepfamilies were formed from remarriage after widowhood, this has been supplanted with remarriage after divorce. In fact, in 2006, less than half (39 %) of Germany’s population lived in a traditional family (“traditional Families”). Likewise, as the perception of stepfamilies has changed, discussion of what it means to be “German” has as well� In the nineteenth century there was a strong pull to unify and solidify what German history was and, consequently, what constituted being “German”� The emphasis on culture and linguistics as defining who could be German, however, has come into question and one can see this manifested in more contemporary legal discussions� Beginning in the early 1990s definitions of German citizenship began to change with legal battles over a naturalization policy that was more inclusive of foreign workers and their descendants residing within Germany� Additionally, international migration is no longer considered a minor branch of administrative law (Ingram 354), but is now a major part of the Federal Ministry of the Interior. While the legal discussions have certainly come to be much more liberal than the mainstream discourse on who should be considered a citizen, there has been a clear shift in the understanding of who is “German�” In contemporary fan fiction, writers challenge the depiction of foreigners as inherently evil as German society moves toward a more liberal conception of citizenship. Birthdates listed on the fan fiction site indicate that most participants grew up during the 1990s and early 2000s� Likewise, as the family structure within Germany changes, it is only natural that familial portrayals in folkand fairytales would follow suit� In the rest of my investigation, I will analyze the ways in which these fan fiction writers changed and adapted the tales 94 Jaime W. Roots I considered above� The writers not only adapted their tales to more modern ideas and understandings of the world by showing the inclusion of foreigners and a disregard for blood relation as necessary for familial bonds, but also to a completely different medium: the Internet and digital storytelling. For FanFiktion�de, the main mode of information is the written word as the fan fiction pieces themselves contain no sound or images. The website describes fan fiction as “Fangeschichten und Gedichte über Charaktere, deren Copyright nicht beim Autor der Arbeit selbst liegt� Eine bereits existierende Geschichte wird von einem Fan derselben weitererzählt, ausgeschmückt oder auch umgeschrieben” (“FanFiktion”). Yet unlike more traditional modes of writing within the literate, Western world, Internet fan fiction as a form of digital storytelling gives “ordinary people” an opportunity to become creators and writers of their own stories much more easily than going through the more traditional means of publishing. One of the major differences is that the means by which fan fiction is being created and produced, i�e� being posted on the Internet with a computer, has become increasingly affordable as well as widespread. Not only is everyone a potential storyteller, but with new technologies such as the Internet, everyone has more of a chance to be read by a wider audience� Thus these stories can come from anyone with access to a computer and the Internet - vastly increasing not only the number of perspectives and interpretations of media, but also vastly increasing their distribution throughout the world� Creators of fan fiction generally seek to expand upon existing knowledge of the text, add explanations of character motivations, bring minor characters into the foreground, and develop or intensify character relationships� Thus quite unlike the anthology put together by the Grimms, where collectors largely transcribed the tales from oral performance and the Grimms edited them, fan fiction versions of these tales, offer multiple ideas and perspectives, as fan fiction writers attempt to understand and re-evaluate the place of traditional stories in their societies. As examples of the changes fan fiction writers undertake when reworking and rewriting a tale, I have chosen three pieces or “fics” from Fan- Fiktion�de� These tales are fan versions of “Aschenputtel,” “Hänsel und Gretel,” and a crossover, or combination, of “Rapunzel” and “Aschenputtel” all of which highlight the importance of close sibling bonds� A fan story entitled “Cinderella - was wäre wenn…? ” opens with the following note from the author to her audience� She writes Cinderella ist in dieser Geschichte nicht begleitet von Mäusen oder einer guten Fee� Eine ihrer beiden Stiefschwestern wird die gute Fee sein und die immer ihr zur Seite stehenden Mäuse� Sie wird alles versuchen um Cinderella weit weg von ihrer Mutter zu bekommen damit sie endlich ein glückliches Leben führen kann […]. (NoBelieveNoTrust) Blood and Family in Fan Fiction Versions of Classic Folktales 95 Right away the writer rejects the idea of the inherently evil stepsister� Cinderella still has an evil stepsister (Ofelia) and stepmother who both follow the traditional trope of untrustworthy, foreign elements entering the family unit� However, her other stepsister, Alyson, cares for her deeply� The story continues: “Alyson, es tut mir leid�” Cinderella schluckt “immer wieder behandelt Ofelia dich so wegen mir und du musst mich beschützen�” Ich [Alyson] drehe mich zu ihr um “weißt du ich erinnere mich immer noch daran wie wir das erste Mal in dem Haus angekommen sind…. Ich hatte wirklich Angst aber als wir ankamen stand ein kleines Mädchen, ungefähr in meinem Alter zu der Zeit, da und hielt einen großen selbstgepflückten Blumenstrauß in der Hand� Ihre lockigen blonden Haare waren total verstrubelt� Sie lief auf meine Mutter zu als diese ausstieg doch die ging einfach an ihr vorbei genauso wie meine Schwester Ofelia� Als ich sah wie traurig das kleine Mädchen war nahm ich meine Bürste und ging auf sie zu� Ich fragte sie ob ich ihre Haare kämmen dürfte und sie strahlte übers ganze Gesicht und als dann ihr Vater verschwand nahm ich mir vor dieses Kind vor meiner Mutter und meiner Schwester zu beschützen� Ich mache all diese Dinge weil ich sie für richtig halt. Verstanden? ” (NoBeliveNoTrust) Loyalty and love are not dependent upon biological ties, but rather on one’s character� The evil sister, Ofelia, is described as incapable of loving anyone other than herself� Yet her inability to love is not tied together with her status as a stepsister� She torments Cinderella, her stepsister, and Alyson, her biological sister, equally� She will do whatever it takes to get what she wants and family ties are unimportant to her. While there is certainly still an aspect of the evil, foreign stepsister and -mother in this tale, the depiction of the loving sister Alyson, questions the Grimm ideal of a purely biologically related family and the evilness of foreigners. While Alyson could still be seen as somehow “foreign” in her status as a stepsister, the tale makes it clear that she has integrated into Cinderella’s life completely and that she is more a part of Cinderella’s family than she is a part of her biological sister Ofelia’s or even her own mother’s. “Die Prinzessin im Turm,” is another tale that features the remarriage of the main figure’s father to a woman with daughters. The stepmother is still evil, and two of the three stepsisters are as well, but the main character, Rosella, finds a good friend and sister in one of her stepsisters. The two girls “spielten den ganzen lieben Tag gemeinsam” (Minerva Fan). When Rosella gets locked in a tower by her evil stepmother, it is her stepsister Anastasia who comes to her rescue� Once freed, the two girls band together and convince their father to exile the evil stepmother and sisters from his kingdom� Anastasia rejects her evil biological mother and siblings in favor of her kind hearted and loving stepsister and stepfather� In their tales, Minerva Fan and NoBelieveNoTrust show the changing status of the family� These stepsisters are integral parts of the family, 96 Jaime W. Roots and do not represent a threat� Instead they are the ones who save and protect their stepsisters from evil� Real families, we see, are made up of people who love each other and they do not necessarily need to be related. While these stories do still have characters who could be described as “die falschen Schwestern,” they are false only because of their selfish natures, not because they are not biologically related� As the concept of the evil foreigner has certainly not been eliminated from the tales but put into question, there is a shift towards examining who belongs and who does not� The tales seem to suggest that many foreign elements in the stories (such as many of the stepsiblings and stepmothers) are still untrustworthy and to be feared, yet there are some who have redeeming qualities and transcend the category of stepfamily� It is no longer necessarily clear that foreign elements are threatening and biological family members are pure and good as fan fiction writers seem to grapple with questions of belonging and inclusion� The relationship between Cinderella and Alyson as well as Rosella and Anastasia show that they are the true sisters� Alyson and Anastasia reject their evil biological sisters in favor of the sweet and kind stepsister� While these two “Aschenputtel” fan stories emphasize that blood relation and hereditary ties do not necessarily determine one’s insider status, and that stepsiblings, if they can prove they have kind hearts, can easily become family, another fan tale simply entitled “Hensel und Gretel,” takes this one step further� In this tale, Hensel and Gretel are no longer related at all. Gretel (or Gre for short) is a young man who has been hired to help around the house after the death of Hensel’s mother. The biological sibling relationship has been completely erased, and the writer, SnowWhiteApple, appears to rely on a popular subset of fan fiction called “slash” to highlight the closeness and devotion of the two men. (“slash” fiction refers to fan fiction that emphasizes romantic same-sex -nearly always male - relationships which are often, but not always, sexual�) Because slash fan fiction almost exclusively describes male / male relationships, Gretel transforms from a sister to a brother figure. Although Gre is of no relation at all (not even a stepsibling), the subject of family and inclusion is emphasized� This is highlighted in a conversation between Gre, Hensel, and Hensel’s father. The father has remarried but states that he hopes Gre will stay with the family� “Gre nickte lächelnd: ‘Ich will nichts anderes als hierbleiben. Ich liebe euch genauso wie meine eigene Familie.’ Nun mischte sich auch Hensel ein: ‘Dann sind wir uns ja einig� Alles andere als das, wäre auch falsch. Ich liebe Gre wie einen großen Bruder’” (SnowWhiteApple). This quote returns us to the discussion of what is considered “falsch�” Hensel makes quite clear that not accepting Gre into the family, although he is nominally a foreign element, would be completely wrong� This version of “Hänsel und Blood and Family in Fan Fiction Versions of Classic Folktales 97 Gretel” shows even more strongly that fan fiction writers are dealing heavily with the discussion of inclusion� Gre, though not a biological family member, should become a part of the family as he has been able to prove himself as trustworthy� In this tale and the others mentioned above, those who stick by us, who protect us, and who love us are just as much a part of our families as those who are biologically related� Hensel and Gre are “brothers” because they choose to be, not because they were born as such� The “brothers” are responsible for each other’s happiness. The reader encounters scenes describing the close relationship between the two as in “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen,” In SnowWhiteApple’s tale, there are scenes suggesting even romantic involvement� The boys frequently stare deeply into each other’s eyes and the reader often encounters descriptions that “[Gre kniete] neben ihn und [berührte] ihn sanft an der Schulter�” The tale continues to highlight the importance and closeness of Hensel and Gre’s relationship and ends with the following conversation: “[Hensel] sah sich um und dann seinem Freund in die Augen: ‘Alles was ich mir wünsche, ist für immer mit dir hier in diesem Haus zu Leben.’ Gre lächelte ebenfalls: ‘Das wünsche ich mir auch.’ Beide blickten in die unendlichen Weiten des blauen Himmel [sic] und so lebten sie glücklich und zufrieden bis ans Ende ihrer Tage�” The ending to SnowWhiteApple’s tale strongly resembles that of “Brüderchen und Schwesterchen�” In both tales, the “siblings” are only happy when they can remain together� Their relationships seem the most important of all and perhaps even more important than possible romantic relationships with others� In reframing this tale as slash fan fiction, SnowWhiteApple emphasizes their intimate relationship in order to imitate the type of closeness and intensely devoted bonds many blood siblings, such as Hänsel and Gretel and Brüderchen and Schwesterchen share in the Grimms’ tales. Their close relationship becomes the most important part of the story as it details not only the devotion and total acceptance of the “brothers,” but also the lengths one will go to in order to save and remain together with someone who is considered family� These fan fiction writers challenge the often one-sided depictions of families shown in the Grimm versions published more than 150 years prior� It is clear that through repeated portrayals of evil stepmothers and -siblings in fan fiction that the elements of the evil or frightening foreigner have not disappeared, but the writers invite and allow a wider interpretation and seem to be seeking to discover what place these tales still hold in their lives. Who belongs and who is excluded is a major part of the dialogue these fan fiction writers are grappling with in their tales. Their familial depictions stand in contrast to the Grimms’ anthology which portrays biological families and stepmothers and -siblings in a clear good vs� evil dichotomy� 98 Jaime W. Roots Folktales have stayed anything but static� They are constantly being retold, rewritten, and reinvented by writers, painters, and filmmakers. In this cross section of fan fiction versions of tales, writers depict the constitution of the families as moving away from the Grimms’ idealistic portrayal of biologically related members with more nuanced depictions of who is considered foreign or evil. The folktale continues to be retold time and again as its flexibility and broad familiarity allows it to be shaped to fit new ideas. Ultimately, folktales grow to represent cultural beliefs and expectations and they continue to be adapted to the ever-changing interpretations and perceptions of our societies� Works Cited Anil, Merih. “No More Foreigners? The Remaking of German Naturalization and Citizenship Law, 1990-2000.” Dialectical Anthropology , 20. 3/ -4 (2005): 453-70. Busse, Kristina and Karen Hellekson. “Introduction: Work in Progress.” Fan Fiction and Fan Communities in the Age of the Internet: New Essays � Ed� Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse. Jefferson, NC : McFarland & Co. Inc., 2006. 5-32. Drotner, Kirsten� “Boundaries and bridges: Digital storytelling in education studies and media studies�” Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-representations in New Media � Ed� Knut Lundby� New York: Peter Lang, 2008� 61—-81� Engstler, Heribert and Sonja Menning� Families in Germany - Facts and Figures. Berlin: German Centre of Gerontology, 2004� “FanFiktion.de: Das Fanfiktion-Archiv.” www.FanFiktion.de. Accessed 10 June 10 2015. Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. Die Märchen der Brüder Grimm: Vollständige Ausgabe � (1857). München: Wilhelm Goldmann Verlag, 1957. Ingram, James D. and Triadafilos Triadafilopoulos. “Rights, Norms, and Politics: The Case of German Citizenship Reform�” Social Research: An International Quarterly 77�1 (Spring 2010): 353-82. Karneeva, Tatiana. “Rival Sisters and Vengeance Motifs in the contes de fées of d’Aulnoy, Lhéritier and Perrault�” MLN 127.4 (Sept 2012): 732-53. Kroeber, Karl� Retelling / Rereading: The Fate of Storytelling in Modern Times � New Brunswick, NJ : Rutgers UP , 1992� Lundby, Knut� “Introduction�” Digital Storytelling, Mediatized Stories: Self-representations in New Media . Ed. Knut Lundby. New York: Peter Lang, 2008. 1-17. Minerva Fan. “Die Prinzessin im Turm.” www.fanfiktion.de. Accessed 22 June 2015. Mustafa, Sam A� “Royal Rebels and Unruly Prussians: Two Centuries of the Napoleonic Wars in German School History Texts.” Internationale Schulbuchforschung 30�1 (2008): 467-85. NoBelieveNoTrust. “Cinderella - was wäre wenn…? ” www.fanfiktion.de. Accessed 19 June 2015� Norton, Robert E� Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment � Ithaca, NY : Cornell UP , 1991� Blood and Family in Fan Fiction Versions of Classic Folktales 99 Peterson, Brent O� “German Nationalism after Napoleon: Caste and Regional Identities in Historical Fiction, 1815-1830.” The German Quarterly 68.3 (Summer 1995): 287-303. Planert, Ute� “From Collaboration to Resistance: Politics, Experience, and Memory of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in Southern Germany.” Central European History 39.4 (2006): 676-705. Richter, Anthony. “‘Blood and Soil’: What It Means to Be German.” World Policy Journal 15.4 (Winter 1999): 91-98. Sanders, Valerie. “‘Lifelong Soulmates? ’: The Sibling Bond in Nineteenth-Century Fiction�” Victorian Review 39.2 (Fall 2013): 54-57. SnowWhiteApple. “Hensel und Gretel.” www.fanfiktion.de. Accessed 23 June 23 2015. Tatar, Maria M� “From Rags to Riches: Fairy Tales and the Family Romance�” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 7.2 (Summer 1982): 31-34. “Traditional Families Ever Less Common in Germany.” Deutsche Welle. November 29, 2011� www�dw�com� Zipes, Jack� “‘The Changing Function of the Fairy Tale�” The Lion and the Unicorn 12�2 (Dec. 1988): 7-31. Autorenverzeichnis Barbara Becker-Cantarino The Ohio State University Dept� of Germanic Languages and Literatures Columbus, OH 43 210 becker-cantarino�1@osu�edu Adrian Daub Stanford University Dept� of German Studies 450 Serra Mall Stanford, California 94 305 daub@stanford�edu Gail Hart University of California, Irvine 229 Humanities Instructional Bldg� Irvine, CA 92 697 gkhart@uci�edu Jordan Lavers University of Western Australia 35 Stirling Hwy� Crawley, Western Australia 6009 jordan�lavers@research�uwa�edu�au Jaime W. Roots, PhD University of California, Santa Cruz Dept� of Languages and Applied Linguistics Santa Cruz, CA 95 064 jroots@ucsc�edu Eleanor ter Horst University of South Alabama Department of Modern and Classical Languages and Literature 5991 USA Drive N�, HUMB 322 Mobile, AL 36 688-0002 eterhorst@southalabama�edu Literaturwissenschaft Narr Francke Attempto Verlag GmbH+Co. KG \ Dischingerweg 5 \ 72070 Tübingen \ Germany Tel. +49 (07071) 9797-0 \ Fax +49 (07071) 97 97-11 \ info@francke.de \ www.francke.de Friederike Tebben Genie und charisma Herrschaftsformen und Führerfiguren im Werk Thomas Manns 2017, 326 Seiten €[D] 68,00 ISBN 978-3-7720-8613-7 Die Geschichte der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts ist durch das Aufkommen totalitärer Systeme gekennzeichnet, die ohne charismatisch wirkende Führerfiguren nicht denkbar sind. Für deren Beschreibung und Analyse hat Max Weber mit seiner Herrschaftstheorie, speziell mit der Profilierung charismatischer Herrschaftstechniken, das grundlegende Instrumentarium geliefert. Dieses Phänomen der charismatischen Herrschaft hat Thomas Mann gesehen und vielfach thematisiert: Von der frühen Erzählung „Beim Propheten“ bis zu dem späten Roman „Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull“ werden private oder kollektive Herrschaftsszenarien entworfen, die eine literaturwissenschaftliche Deskription, Analyse und Interpretation charismatischer Funktionsmechanismen nahelegen. Thomas Mann beschreibt charismatische Herrschaftsformen mit außerordentlicher Hellsicht und macht sie für die dargestellten kulturellen und politischen Sachverhalte geltend - wenn auch auf der Bedeutungsbasis des traditionellen Genie- und Künstlerbegriffs. + untersucht erstmalig Max Webers Theorie der charismatischen Herrschaft bei Thomas Manns Gesamtwerk + Beitrag zur Thomas Mann-Forschung und zum Verständnis politischkultureller Entwicklungen des 20. Jahrhunderts + analysiert die Faszination totalitärer Führerfiguren unter Berücksichtigung des Genie- und Charisma-Diskurses ISSN 0010-1338 T h e m e n h eft: A lle M e n s c h e n we rd e n S c hwe s te r n: S i s te rs a nd S orority in th e G e rm a n C ultural Tra dition G a s th e ra u s g e b e r: G ail H a r t G ail H a r t: Introdu c tion: A ll e M e n s c h e n we rd e n S c hwe s t e r n : S i s te r s a n d S orority in th e G e r m a n C ultu ral Tra dition B a rb a ra B e c ke r- C a nta rino: S elb s t s tä n dig keit, E m p athie u n d L o yalität: B ettin e B re nta no-von A r nim u n d ih re G e s c hwi s te r J ord a n L ave rs : “ L ie b e , bö s e , L in e ! ” : M aintainin g S orority th rou g h th e E xp re s s ion of E m otion in th e L ette r s of K a rolin e von G ün d e rrod e a n d h e r S i s te r s E lea nor te r H ors t: O b s c u re Con c e ption s : T h e O rigin s of E . T. A . H offm a n n ’ s D a s G e lü b d e a n d K lei s t ’ s D i e M a rq ui s e v o n O… A dria n D a ub: T h e B alla d a n d it s Fa milie s - C h ri s tin a R o s s etti, A n n ette von D ro s te - H ül s hoff, F rie d ri c h H e b b el a n d th e A nti- B alla d r y of S i s te r hood J aim e W. R oot s : “ M ä rc h e n m al a n d e r s ” : B lood a n d Fa mily in Fa n F i c tion Ve r s ion s of C la s s i c F olktale s periodicals.narr.de
